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THE 


WISDOM 


OF 


BERNARD 


SHAW 



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THE WISDOM OF 
BERNARD SHAW 

BEING PASSAGES FROM THE 
WORKS OF BERNARD SHAW 
CHOSEN BY CHARLOTTE F. SHAW 



NEW YORK 

BRENTANO'S 
1913 



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Copyright, 1913, by Bernard Shaw 






©CI.A847801 rt_. 



T i Actor Page 1 5 

/ nonitions 19 

the World's a Stage . . . . 19 

irchy 21 

21 

_. u for Art's Sake 32 

The Artist and the Tradesman . 33 

Assassination 37 

Assertions 37 

The Puritan Attitude .... 40 
The Romantic Attitude . . .41 

Autobiography 41 

Autres Temps Autres Moeurs . . 42 

Beethoven . ; 43 

The Bible 45 

Books 48 

Both Sides 49 

Bringing the Accusation Home . 49 

Bunyan, Shakespear and Heroism . 50 

Children and Religious Teaching . 52 

Christianity 53 

Christmas 54 

Citizenship and Circumstances . 54 

Conscience . 56 

Conventional Morality .... 56 

5 



Table of 
Contents 



coSln?s Courage Page 60 

Cowardice 61 

___The Criminal Law 62 

Criticism 63 

The Crows that Follow the Plough 64 

Cruelty 66 

Democracy 66 

Democracy and Justice .... 72 

The Devil's Friends 73 

Discipline 74. 

Discriminations 75! 

Divorce and Sacramental Marriage 86! 

The Dramatist 87! 

Duty 881 

Economic Independence . . . 91 
The Economic Independence of 

Women 92 

Education 92 

The Elocutionist 95 

The End and the Means • • • 97 

The English Home 98 

The Englishman lOl 

The Englishman and the Comic 

Spirit IOC 

Equality . llf 

6 



The Personal Factor . . Page 117 J^JJ|„;| 

Famous Actors 118 

The Farcical Comedy . . . .123 

Formulas 126 

The God of Fine Ladies . . .126 

The Golden Rule 128 

The Governing Classes . . . :- . 129 
The Great Man's Burden . . .135 

Happiness 136 

Heaven 136 

Heaven and Hell . . . . . 137 

Hell 139 

The Hereditary Principle . . .141 

The Home 141 

Home Rule 142 

Hospitals 143 

A Humanitarian 145 

Human Nature and Institutions . 146 

Ibsen 147 

Ibsen and Shakespear .... 149 

The Idea 152 

[deals ......... 153 

Idealism .155 

The Illusion of the Stage . . .159 
imperialism „ . 161 

i 7 



C6nL?l Individuality Page 162 

Infirmity of Purpose . . . .164 

The Injured Husband .... 165 

Inspiration 167 

The Instability of Morals . . .167 

Our Institutions 169 

It Begins to Date 170 

Mr. Henry James's Novels . . -173 
John Bunyan and William Shakespear i "jG 

Judgment 184 

Laodiceanism 185 

Law 188 

The Law of Rent 191 

The Lie 193 

The Life Force 193 

London 203 

Love 205 

The Machine-Made Man . . . 2o6| 

The Manicheism of Party Politics . 207 

Marat and Charlotte Corday . . 208 

'^■Marriage 210 

^The Marriage Laws 216 

'*^'Marriage and the Reformation . 222 

Materialism ... . . . . 223 

Maternity 226 

8 



Meat and Drink .... Page 227 Jj^Lti 

The Medical Profession . . . 228 

Melodrama 231 

Methods of Reform 232 

Middle Class Unsociability . .233 

Might and Right 234 

Militarism 237 

Miracles 238 

Money . . . . . . . . 238 

Morality 241 

Morality and Censorships . . . 247 

Moral Passion 250 

Motherhood 251 

Mothers and the State . . . .251 

Municipal Trading 252 

Nationalism 256 

Nice People 258 

The Nineteenth Century . . . 258 
'Not What They Like, but What is 

Good for Them 259 

Observations 262 

Obsolete Institutions .... 262 

Oscar Wilde's Plays 264 

Parasitic Trades 267 

The Passions 367 

9 



coSL?I The Peace Which Passeth all Un- 
derstanding .... Page 269 

Personal 269 

Personal Mindedness .... 273 

The Philosopher 273 

The Philosopher's Brain . . . 277 

The Philosophy of Life .... 279 

Political Economy 280 

Poverty 280 

Poverty and Wealth .... 286 

Prayer 292 

The Problem Play 293 

Professional Work . . . . . 294 

Progress 296 

Public Life 301 

Punch and Judy 301 

Punishment 302 

The Pure Fool 305 

Real Plays 305 

Reason 307 

Reflections 307 

Religion on the Stage . . . .312 
Religions and Poverty . . . .314 

Remuneration 315 

Rent of Ability 317 



10 



Reparation Page 319 

Reputations 319 

Resentment 320 

Retaliation . . . . . . . 320 

Reverence 323 

Revolution 323 

Right and Wrong 329 

The Right to Live 332 

Romance . . 333 

The Romances of Science . . . 339 

Routine Morality 340 

Routine Morality and the Superman 343 

Saving 343 

The Secret of the Governing Caste 344 

Self-Control 345 

Self-Sacrifice 346 

Shakespear 348 

Shakespear's Music 351 

Shakespear's Plays 356 

The Shirtfront 366 

The Snob 369 

Social Chaos 370 

Social Questions 371 

Soul Hunger 372 

The Soul's Spring Cleaning . . 372 
II 



Table of 
Contents 



co5ln?s' The Stage Villain . . . Page 373 

Style 375 

Submission 376 

The Superman 376 

The Theatre 385 

Toleration -385 

The Two Pioneers 387 

Values 388 

A Vigilance Association . . . 389 

The Deadly Virtues 393 

Vivisection 393 

War 398 

Warnings 399 

Wealth 400 

Wealth and Punishment . . . 402 

The Will 402 

The Will to Believe . . . * . . 403 
The Will to Live and its Conse- 
quences 404 

The Will and the Spirit . . . 405 

Wisdom 406 

Woman 406 

Woman and Sex Initiative . . . 414 
Work for the Unemployed . . . 420 
The Young and the Old . . . 420 



12 



I 



THE WISDOM OF 
BERNARD SHAW 



'T'HE accomplishments which distin- J^f^^ 
-'' guish the trained actor from the 
amateur are not the same as the quali- 
ties which distinguish great actors from 
ordinary ones. Take, first, the differ- 
ence between the trained actor and the 
man In the street — the layman. When 
the layman walks, his only object Is to 
get to Charing Cross; when he makes 
a gesture. It Is to attract the attention 
of a cab-driver or bus-conductor; when 
he speaks, It Is to convey or demand 
information, or tell a He, or otherwise 
further his prosaic ends; when he moves 
his hands. It is to put up his umbrella 
or to take out his handkerchief. On 
the stage these merely utilitarian pur- 
poses are only simulated: the real pur- 
pose Is to produce an effect on the 
senses and imagination of the spectator. 
The actor's walk Is addressed to the 
spectator's sense of grace, dignity, or 
strength of movement, and his voice to 
the listener's sense of expressive or 
beautiful tone. Impersonations even of 

IS 



ugly or deformed creatures with harsh 
voices have the same artistic character, 
and are agreeably disagreeable, just as 
the most extreme discords in a sym- 
phony or opera are distinctly musical, 
and perfectly different to the random 
cacophonies which arise from the tun- 
ing of the orchestra. Now, the power 
of complying with artistic conditions 
without being so preoccupied by them 
as to be incapable of thinking of any- 
thing else is hard to acquire, and can 
be perfected only by long practice. 
Talma estimated the apprenticeship at 
twenty years. The habit can never be- 
come as instinctive as keeping one's bal- 
ance, for instance, because failure in 
that for even an instant means a fall, 
so that the practice in it is lifelong and 
constant; whereas the artistic habit 
lapses more or less in the absence of 
an audience, and even on the stage can 
be forgotten for long periods without 
any worse consequences than a loss of 
charm which nothing may bring to the 
i6 



actor's attention. The real safeguard 
against such lapses is a sense of beauty 
— the artistic sense — cultivated to such 
a degree of sensitiveness that a coarse 
or prosaic tone, or an awkward gesture, 
jars instantly on the artist as a note 
out of tune jars on the musician. The 
defect of the old-fashioned systems of 
training for the stage was that they 
attempted to prescribe the conclusions 
of this constantly evolving artistic sense 
instead of cultivating it and leaving the 
artist to its guidance. Thus they taught 
you an old-fashioned stage-walk, an old- 
fashioned stage-voice, an old-fashioned 
stage way of kneeling, of sitting down, 
of shaking hands, of picking up a hand- 
kerchief, and so on, each of them sup- 
posed to be the final and perfect way 
of doing it. The end of that was, of 
course, to discredit training altogether. 
But neglect of training very quickly dis- 
credits itself; and It will now perhaps 
be admitted that the awakening and 
culture of the artistic conscience Is a real 

17 



service which a teacher can render to an 
actor. When that conscience Is thor- 
oughly awakened and cultivated, when 
a person can maintain vigilant artistic 
sensitiveness throughout a performance 
whilst making all the movements re- 
quired by the action of the drama, and 
speaking all its dialogue graphically 
without preoccupation or embarrass- 
ment, then that person Is a technically 
competent artistic actor, able to play a 
part of which he hardly comprehends 
one line, in a play of which he knows 
nothing except his own words and 
speeches and the cues thereto, much 
more Intelligibly and effectively, as 
well as agreeably, than a statesman 
with ten times his general ability 
could. He can only be beaten, in fact, 
by the professional rival who has 
equal skill in execution, but has more 
numerous and valuable Ideas to exe- 
cute. The finest actors — Jefferson, Co- 
quelln, Salvini, Duse — carry this tech- 
nical skill to such a point that though 
i8 



they act so beautifully that you cannot 
take your eyes off them even when you 
do not understand what they are saying, 
yet the beauty seems so spontaneous and 
Inevitable that It Is generally quite Im- 
possible to persuade their admirers that 
there Is any art or study In their acting 
at all. The Saturday Review^ I2th 
October 1895. _j..j_ 

'VrOU cannot believe In honor until ^?J?J°" 

you have achieved It. Better keep 
yourself clean and bright: you are the 
window through which you must see the 
world. Man and Superman^ p. 233. 

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other 
people without blushing. 
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to 
those you love, you will end by hating 
those to whom you have sacrificed your- 
self. Man and Superman^ p. 244. 

"^OTHING Is more significant than ^o^w's 
-^^ the statement that " all the world's a stage 
^ 5tage." The whole world is ruled by 



theatrical illusion. Between the Caesars, 
the emperors, the Christian heroes, the 
Grand Old Men, the kings, prophets, 
saints, heroes and judges, of the news- 
papers and the popular imagination, and 
the actual Juliuses, Napoleons, Gor- 
dons, Gladstones, and so on, there is 
the same difference as between Hamlet 
and Sir Henry Irving. The case is not 
one of fanciful similitude, but of iden- 
tity. The great critics are those who 
penetrate and understand the illusion: 
the great men are those who, as drama- 
tists planning the development of na- 
tions, or as actors carrying out the 
drama, are behind the scenes of the 
world instead of gaping and gushing in 
the auditorium after paying their taxes 
at the doors. And yet Shakespear, with 
the rarest opportunities of observing 
this, lets his pregnant metaphor slip, 
and, with his usual incapacity for pur- 
suing any idea, wanders off into a 
grandmotherly Elizabethan edition of 
the advertisement of Cassell's Popular 



20 



Educator. How anybody over the age 
of seven can take any interest in a lit- 
erary toy so silly in its conceit and com- 
mon in its ideas as the Seven Ages of j 
Man passes my understanding. The ! 
Saturday Review^ 5th December 1896. 

A PPLIED to the industrial or polit- Anarchy 
'^ ical machinery of modern society, 
anarchy must always reduce itself speed- 
ily to absurdity. Even the modified 
form of anarchy on which modern 
civilization is based: that is, the aban- 
donment of industry, in the name of 
individual liberty, to the upshot of 
competition for personal gain between 
private capitalists, is a disastrous fail- 
ure, and is, by the mere necessities of 
the case, giving way to ordered Social- 
ism. The Perfect Wagnerite, p. 79. 



/^^SAR [seeing Apollodorus and call- Art 
^^ ing to him~\ Apollodorus : I leave 
the art of Egypt in your charge. Re- 



member: Rome loves art and will en- 
courage it ungrudgingly. 
APOLLODORUS. I understand, Caesar. 
Rome will produce no art itself; but it 
will buy up and take away whatever the 
other nations produce. 
c^SAR. What! Rome produce no 
art! Is peace not an art? Is war not 
an art? Is government not an art? Is 
civilization not an art? All these we 
give you in exchange for a few orna- 
ments. Casar and Cleopatra^ p. 193. 

The claim of art to our respect must 
stand or fall with the validity of its 
pretension to cultivate and refine our 
senses and faculties until seeing, hear- 
ing, feeling, smelling, and tasting be- 
come highly conscious and critical acts 
with us, protesting vehemently against 
ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frow- 
zy clothing, and re-breathed air, and 
taking keen interest and pleasure in 
beauty. In music, and in nature, besides 
making us insist, as necessary for com- 



fort and decency, on clean, wholesome, 
handsome fabrics to wear, and utensils 
of fine material and elegant workman- 
ship to handle. Further, art should 
refine our sense of character and con- 
duct, of justice and sympathy, greatly 
heightening our self-knowledge, self- 
control, precision of action, and consid- 
erateness, and making us intolerant of 
baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellec- 
tual superficiality or vulgarity. The 
worthy artist or craftsman is he who 
serves the physical and moral senses 
by feeding them with pictures, musical 
compositions, pleasant houses and gar- 
dens, good clothes and fine implements, 
poems, fictions, essays, and dramas 
which call the heightened senses and 
ennobled faculties into pleasurable ac- 
tivity. The great artist is he who goes 
a step beyond the demand, and, by sup- 
plying works of a higher beauty and a 
higher interest than have yet been per- 
ceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle 
with its strangeness, in adding this fresh 



4 



extension of sense to the heritage of the 
race. The Sanity of Jrt, p. 68. 

I am convinced that fine art is the 
subtlest, the most seductive, the most 
effective means of moral propagandism 
in the world, excepting only the example 
of personal conduct; and I waive even 
this exception in favour of the art of 
the stage, because It works by exhibiting 
examples of personal conduct made in- 
telligible and moving to crowds of un- 
observant unreflecting people to whom 
real life means nothing. Author's Apol- 
ogy. Mrs. Warren's Profession, p- 25. 

The severity of artistic discipline is 
produced by the fact that in creative 
art no ready-made rules can help you. 
There is nothing to guide you to the 
right expression for your thought ex- 
cept your own sense of beauty and fit- 
ness; and, as you advance upon those 
who went before you, that sense of 
beauty and fitness is necessarily often in 
24 



conflict, not with fixed rules, because 

there are no rules, but with precedents. 

The Sanity of Art^ p. 82. 

In all the arts there is a distinction be- 
tween the mere physical artistic faculty, 
consisting of a very fine sense of color, 
form, tone, rhythmic movement, and so 
on, and that supreme sense of humanity 
which alone can raise the art work cre- 
ated by the physical artistic faculties Into 
a convincing presentment of life. The 
Saturday Review, 6th June 1896. 

All art Is gratuitous; and the will to 
produce It, like the will to live, must be 
held to justify Itself. When that will 
Is associated with brilliant specific talent 
for the established forms and attractions 
of fine art, no advance is made, because 
the artist can distinguish and satisfy 
himself by novel, witty and touching 
rehandllngs of the old themes. If 
Wagner had possessed the astonishing 
specific talent of Mozart, or Mr. 
George Meredith that of Dickens, they 

25 



would not have been forced to make a 
revolution In their art by lifting it to 
a plane on which it developed new and 
extraordinary specific talents in them- 
selves, and revealed the old specific tal- 
ents to them as mere hindrances. A 
critic who has not learned this from the 
nineteenth century has learned nothing. 
Such a one, on discovering that a writer 
is deficient in all current specific talents, 
at once condemns him without benefit 
of clergy. But for my part, when I 
find the characteristic devotion of the 
born artist accompanied by a hopeless 
deficiency in all the fashionable specific 
talents I immediately give him my most 
respectful attention, and am particularly 
careful to indulge in none of those 
prophecies of extinction which were so 
confidently launched at Wagner, Ibsen, 
and Meredith. The Saturday Review, 
2nd April 1898. 

I call Madox Brown a Realist because 

he had vitality enough to find intense 

26 



enjoyment and Inexhaustible Interest in 
the world as It really Is, unbeautlfied, 
unideallzed, untltlvated In any way for 
artistic consumption. This love of life 
and knowledge of its worth is a rare 
thing — whole Alps and Andes above the 
common market demand for prettlness, 
fashlonableness, refinement, elegance 
of style, delicacy of sentiment, charm 
of character, sympathetic philosophy 
(the philosophy of the happy ending), 
decorative moral systems contrasting 
roseate and rapturous vice with lllied 
and languorous virtue, and making 
" Love " face both ways as the univer- 
sal softener and redeemer, the whole 
being worshipped as beauty or virtue, 
and set in the place of life to narrow 
and condition it Instead of enlarging 
and fulfilling it. To such self-indulgence 
most artists are mere pandars; for the 
sense of beauty needed to make a man 
an artist is so strong that the sense of 
life in him must needs be quite pro- 
digious to overpower It. It must always 

27 



be a mystery to the ordinary beauty- 
fancying, life-shirking amateur how the 
realist in art can bring his unbeautified, 
remorseless celebrations of common life 
in among so many pretty, pleasant, 
sweet, noble, touching fictions, and yet 
take his place there among the highest, 
although the railing, the derision, the 
protest, the positive disgust, are almost 
universal at first. The Saturday Re- 
view, 13th March 1897. 

Turn to Mr. Watts, and you are in- 
stantly in a visionary world, in which 
life fades into mist, and the imaginings 
of nobility and beauty with which we 
invest life become embodied and visible. 
The gallery is one great transfiguration : 
life, death, love, and mankind are no 
longer themselves : they are glorified, 
sublimified, lovelified: the very draperies 
are either rippling lakes of color har- 
mony, or splendid banners like the fly- 
ing cloak of Titian's Bacchus In the 
National Gallery. To pretend that the 
28 



world is like this Is to live the heavenly 
life. It Is to lose the whole world and 
gain one's own soul. Until you have 
reached the point of realizing what an 
astonishingly bad bargain that Is you 
cannot doubt the sufficiency of Mr. 
Watts' art, provided only your eyes are 
fine enough to understand Its language 
of line and color. The Saturday Re- 
view^ 13th March 1897. 

Truly the secret of wisdom is to become 
as a little child again. But our art- 
loving authors will not learn the lesson. 
They cannot understand that when a 
great genius lays hands on a form of 
art and fascinates all who understand 
its language with it, he makes it say all 
that it can say, and leaves it exhausted. 
When Bach has got the last word out 
of the fugue, Mozart out of the opera, 
Beethoven out of the symphony, Wag- 
ner out of the symphonic drama, their 
enraptured admirers exclaim: "Our 
masters have shewn us the way: let us 
29 



compose some more fugues, operas, 
symphonies, and Bayreuth dramas." 
Through just the same error the men 
who have turned dramatists on the 
frivolous ground of their love for the 
theatre have plagued a weary world 
with Shakespearean dramas in five acts 
and in blank verse, with artificial com- 
edies after Congreve and Sheridan, and 
with the romantic goody-goody fiction 
which was squeezed dry by a hundred 
strong hands in the first half of this 
century. It is only when we are dissat- 
isfied with existing masterpieces that we 
create new ones: if we merely worship 
them, we only try to repeat the exploit 
of their creator by picking out the tit- 
bits and stringing them together, in some 
feeble fashion of our own, into a " new 
and original " botching of what our 
master left a good and finished job. 
We are encouraged in our folly by the 
need of the multitude for intermediaries 
between its childishness and the ma- 
turity of the mighty men of art, and 

30 



also by the fact that art fecundated by 
itself gains a certain lapdog refinement, 
very acceptable to lovers of lapdogs. 
The Incas of Peru cultivated their royal 
race in this way, each Inca marrying his 
sister. The result was that an average 
Inca was worth about as much as an 
average fashionable drama bred care- 
fully from the last pair of fashionable 
dramas, themselves bred in the same 
way, with perhaps a cross of novel. 
But vital art work comes always from 
a cross between art and life: art being 
of one sex only, and quite sterile by it- 
self. Such a cross is always possible; 
for though the artist may not have the 
capacity to bring his art into contact 
with the higher life of his time, ferment- 
ing in its religion, its philosophy, its 
science, and its statesmanship (perhaps, 
indeed, there may not be any statesman- 
ship going), he can at least bring it into 
contact with the obvious life and com- 
mon passions of the streets. The Sat- 
urday Review^ 6th November 1897. 



AJt's""" A RT for art's sake" means In prac- 
sake -^^ tice " Success for money's sake." 
Great art Is never produced for Its own 
sake. It Is too difficult to be worth the 
effort. All the great artists enter Into 
a terrible struggle with the public, often 
involving bitter poverty and personal hu- 
miliation, and always Involving calumny 
and persecution, because they believe 
they are apostles doing what used to be 
called the Will of God, and Is now called 
by many prosaic names, of which " pub- 
lic work " is the least controversial. 
And when these artists have travailed 
and brought forth, and at last forced the 
public to associate keen pleasure and 
deep Interest with their methods and 
morals, a crowd of smaller men — art 
confectioners, we may call them — hasten 
to make pretty entertainments out of 
scrap and crumbs from the master- 
pieces. Offenbach laid hands on Beet- 
hoven's Seventh Symphony and pro- 
duced J'alme les mllltalres, to the dis- 
gust of Schumann, who was nevertheless 



32 



doing precisely the same thing in a more 
pretentious way. And these confection- 
ers are by no means mere plagiarists. 
They bring all sorts of engaging quali- 
ties to their work: love of beauty, desire 
to give pleasure, tenderness, humor, 
everything except the high republican 
conscience, the Identification of the art- 
ist's purpose with the purpose of the 
universe, which alone makes an artist 
great. Three Plays by Brieux^ Preface, 
pp. XX., xxi. 

New Ideas make their technique as wa- 
ter makes Its channel; and the technician 
without ideas is as useless as the canal 
constructor without water, though he 
may do very skilfully what the Missis- 
sippi does very crudely. Three Plays 
for Puritans^ p. xxxiil. 



WHAT happens under our system The Artist 
, Y 1 •' J and the 

IS that the tradesman supersedes Tradesman 

the artist. The tradesman adapts him- 
self to the market : he offers you a thlrd- 

33 



class article for a third-class price, and 
a second-class article for a second-class 
price, preferring the third-class contract 
if, as often happens, it is the more prof- 
itable. First-class work he cannot do 
at all; and the man who can do it, the 
artist, cannot do anything else. When 
second or third-class work is demanded, 
he may, and very often does, try to do 
it for the sake of the money, a man 
with a wife and family being, as Talley- 
rand said, capable of anything; but he 
inevitably botches it, and only confirms 
his employer's prejudice against artists 
and in favor of tradesmen. A Bovril 
or Condensed Milk poster by Sir Ed- 
ward Burne-Jones would probably be 
worth no more than Wagner's Philadel- 
phia Centennial march. 
But the world is not quite so clear-cut 
as this description of it. The distinction 
between artist and tradesman is not a 
distinction between one man and an- 
other, but between two sides of the same 
man. The number of persons who, be- 

34 



ing unquestionably eminent artists, have 
yet been so absolutely uncommercial as 
to be uninfluenced by their market, Is 
very small Indeed; and of these some, 
like Giotto, have found their market so 
entirely sympathetic that In doing as 
they pleased they simply sailed before 
the wind; whilst others, like Shelley, 
Goethe, or Landor, were independent 
of It In point of both money and social 
standing. Beethoven, Wagner, and 
Ibsen, though dependent on their art 
for both money and position, certainly 
did eventually take Europe by the scruff 
of the neck and say, " You shall take 
what I like and not what you want " ; 
but in comparison with Bunyan and 
Blake they were keen men of business. 
I know of no dramatist dependent on 
his profession who has not been very 
seriously Influenced by his market. 
Shakespear's case, the leading one for 
England, Is beyond a doubt. He would 
have starved If he had followed his bent 
towards a genuine science of life and 

35 



character. His instinct for reality had 
to be surreptitiously gratified under the 
mask of comedy. Dr. Johnson pointed 
out long ago that it was only in comedy 
that our immortal stalking horse for 
bogus criticism was really happy. To 
this day such splendid melodramas as 
Othello, with Its noble savage, its vil- 
lain, its funny man. Its carefully as- 
sorted pathetic and heavy feminine in- 
terest, its smothering and suicide. Its 
police-court morality and commonplace 
thought; or, As You Like It, with its 
Adelphi hero. Its prize fight, its coquet 
In tights, its good father and wicked 
uncle, represent the greatness of Shak- 
spear to nine-tenths of his adorers, 
who mostly, when you mention Helena, 
or the Countess of Rousillon, or Isa- 
bella, or Cresslda, or Ulysses, or Ber- 
tram stare at you, and think you are 
talking about Calderon and Homer. 
The Saturday Review, I2th February 
1898. 



36 



V 



CURELY, If dramatists are bent on Assassina- 

the fundamentally impossible task 
of Inventing pardonable assassinations, 
they should recognize that the man 
who, for no reward or satisfaction to 
his direct personal instincts, but at the 
risk of his own life, kills for the sake 
of an Idea, believing that he Is striking 
In the cause of the general weal. Is at 
any rate more respectable than the de- 
humanized creature who stabs or 
shoots to slake a passion which he has 
in common with a stag. The Saturday 
Review, ist June 1895. 

t-TUMANITY Is neither a commer- Assertions 

cial nor a political speculation, but 
a condition of noble life. 

Civilization and the Soldier. The 
Humane Review, January 1901, 
P- 312. 

SIR PATRICK. There are two things 
that can be wrong with any man. One 
of them Is a cheque. The other Is a 

37 



woman. Until you know that a man's 
sound on these two points, you know 
nothing about him. The Doctor s Di- 
lemma, p. 47. 

Honor is worth its danger and its cost, 
and life is worthless without honor. 
John Bull's Other Island, p. Ixi. 

The balance sheet of a city's welfare 
cannot be stated in figures. Counters 
of a much more spiritual kind are 
needed, and some imagination and con- 
science to add them up, as well. The 
Common Sense of Municipal Trading, 
p. V. 

It is only the man who has no mes- 
\ sage who is too fastidious to beat the 
drum at the door of his booth. Three 
Plays by Brieux^ Preface, p. x. 

BOHUN. McComas: there will be no 
difficulty about the important questions. 
There never is. It is the trifles that 
will wreck you at the harbor mouth. 
You Never Can Tell, p. 323. 

38 



MRS. CLANDON. Let me tell you, Mr. 
Valentine, that a life devoted to the 
Cause of Humanity has enthusiasms 
and passions to offer which far tran- 
scend the selfish personal infatuations 
and sentimentalities of romance. You 
Never Can Tell, p. 296. 

LESBIA. As I said before, an English 
lady is not the slave of her appetites. 
That is what an English gentleman 
seems incapable of understanding. Get- 
ting Married, p. 220. 

POTHINUS [bitterly] Is it possible that 
Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has 
time to occupy himself with such a trifle 
as our taxes? 

C^SAR. My friend: taxes are the chief 
business of a conqueror of the world. 
Casar and Cleopatra, p. 117. 

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people 
like : it is the only way in which a man 
can become famous without ability. 
The DeviVs Disciple, p. ^6, 

39 



»unte 



Progress is not achieved by panic- 
stricken rushes back and forward be- 
tween one folly and another, but by 
sifting all movements and adding what 
survives the sifting to the fabric of our 
morality. Three Plays by Brieux, Pref- 
ace, p. xliv. 

pSritan T HAVE, I think, always been a Puri- 
Att^tude -■■ tan in my attitude towards Art. I 
am as fond of fine music and handsome 
building as Milton was, or Cromwell, 
or Bunyan; but if I found that they 
were becoming the instruments of a sys- 
tematic idolatry of sensuousness, I 
would hold it good statesmanship to 
blow every cathedral in the world to 
pieces with dynamite, organ and all, 
without the least heed to the screams 
of the art critics and cultured volup- 
tuaries. And when I see that the nine- 
teenth century has crowned the idola- 
try of Art with the deification of Love, 
so that every poet is supposed to have 
pierced to the holy of holies when he 
40 



has announced that Love is the Su- 
preme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel 
that Art was safer In the hands of the 
most fanatical of Cromwell's major- 
generals than It will be If ever It gets 
Into mine. The pleasures of the senses 
I can sympathize with and share; but 
the substitution of sensuous ecstasy for 
Intellectual activity and honesty Is the 
very devil. Three Plays for Puritans, 
p. XX. 

THE lot of the man who sees life The 
1 11*11 ■ * Romantic 

truly and thrnks about it romanti- Attitude 

cally Is Despair. How well we know 

the cries of that despair! Three 

Plays for Puritans, p. xxvIII. 



ALL autobiographies are lies. I do Auto- 
, • • , biography 

not mean unconscious, uninten- 
tional lies: I mean deliberate lies. No 
man is bad enough to tell the truth 
about himself during his lifetime, in- 
volving, as it must, the truth about his 

41 



/ 



Autres 
Temps 
Autres 
Mxurs 



family and friends and colleagues. 
And no man Is good enough to tell the 
truth to posterity In a document which 
he suppresses until there Is nobody left 
alive to contradict him. 

In the Days of my Youth. 
M.J. P., 17th September 1898, 

'T'HE disloyalty of Hampden and 
of Washington; the revolting Im- 
morality of Luther in not only marry- 
ing when he was a priest, but actually 
marrying a nun; the heterodoxy of 
Galileo; the shocking blasphemies and 
sacrileges of Mahomet against the 
Idols whom he dethroned to make way 
for his conception of one god; and the 
still more startling blasphemy of 
Jesus when he declared God to be the 
son of man and himself to be the son 
of God, are all examples of shocking 
Immoralities (every Immorality shocks 
somebody) the suppression and extinc- 
tion of which would have been more 
42 



disastrous than the utmost mischief 
that can be conceived as ensuing from 
the toleration of vice. The Shewing- 
up of Blanco Posnet, p. 348. 

"DEETHOVEN was the first man Beethoven 

who used music with absolute In- 
tegrity as the expression of his own 
emotional life. Others had shewn 
how It could be done — had done it 
themselves as a curiosity of their art In 
rare, self-indulgent, unprofessional mo- 
ments — but Beethoven made this, and 
nothing else, his business. Stupendous 
as the resultant difference was between 
his music and any other ever heard In 
the world before his time, the distinc- 
tion Is not clearly apprehended to this 
day, because there was nothing new in 
the musical expression of emotion: 
every progression In Bach is sanctified 
by emotion; and Mozart's subtlety, 
delicacy, and exquisite tender touch 
and noble feeling were the despair of 
all the musical world. But Bach's 

43 



theme was not himself, but his religion; 
and Mozart was always the dramatist 
and story-teller, making the men and 
women of his imagination speak, and 
dramatizing even the instruments in his 
orchestra, so that you know their very 
sex the moment their voices reach 
you. Haydn really came nearer to 
Beethoven, for he is neither the praiser 
of God nor the dramatist, but, always 
within the limits of good manners and 
of his primary function as a purveyor 
of formal decorative music, a man of 
moods. This is how he created the 
symphony and put it ready-made into 
Beethoven's hand. The revolution- 
ary giant at once seized it, and, throw- 
ing supernatural religion, convention- 
al good manners, dramatic fiction, and 
all external standards and objects into 
the lumber room, took his own human- 
ity as the material of his music, and 
expressed it all without compromise, 
from his roughest jocularity to his 
holiest aspiration after what purely hu- 



man reign of Intense life — of Freude — 
when 

Alle Menschen werden Briider 
Wo dein sanfter Fliigel weilt. 

In thus fearlessly expressing himself, 
he has, by his common humanity, ex- 
pressed us as well, and shewn us how 
beautifully, how strongly, how trust- 
worthily we can build with our own 
real selves. This is what is proved 
by the immense superiority of the 
Beethoven symphony to any oratorio 
or opera. The Saturday Review, 14th 
November 1896. 

T IKE all highly developed litera- The 

tures, the Bible contains a great 
deal of sensational fiction, imagined 
with Intense vividness, appealing to the 
most susceptible passions, and narrated 
with a force which the ordinary man 
Is quite unable to resist. Perhaps only 
an expert can thoroughly appreciate 
the power with which a story well told, 

45 



or an assertion well made, takes pos- 
session of a mind not specially trained 
to criticize it. Try to imagine all that 
is most powerful in English literature 
bound into one volume, and offered to 
a comparatively barbarous race as an J 
instrument of civilization invested with 
supernatural authority! Indeed, let 
us leave what we call barbarous races 
out of the question, and suppose it of- 
fered to the English nation on the same 
assumptions as to its nature and au- 
thority which the children in our popu- 
lar schools are led to make to-day con- 
cerning the Bible under the School 
Board compromise! How much re- 
sistance would there be to the illusion 
created by the art of our great story- 
tellers? Who would dare to affirm 
that the men and women created by 
Chaucer, Shakespear, Bunyan, Field- 
ing, Goldsmith, Scott and Dickens had 
never existed? Who could resist the 
force of conviction carried by the tre- 
mendous assertive power of Cobbett, 
46 



the gorgeous special-pleading of Rus- 
kin, or the cogency of Sir Thomas 
More, or even Matthew Arnold? 
Above all, who could stand up against 
the inspiration and moral grandeur of 
our prophets and poets, from Lang- 
land to Blake and Shelley? The power 
of Scripture has not waned with the 
ages. We have no right to trick a 
child's instinctive sense of revelation 
and inspiration by such a surpassingly 
blasphemous pessimistic lie as that both 
have become extinct, and that the 
wretched world, like its dead moon, is 
hving out its old age on a scanty rem- 
nant of spiritual energy, hoarded from 
thousands of years ago. And yet the 
whole question at stake in the School 
Board election was whether this lie 
should be told as a black lie or a white 
one. The stupid part of the business 
is that it is quite unnecessary to tell any 
lies at all. Why not teach children 
the realities of inspiration and revela- 
tion as they work daily through scribes 

47 



and lawgivers? It would, at all events, 
make better journalists and parish 
councillors of them. The Saturday 
Review, 27th November 1897. 

Books 'Y'HEODOTUS.i Caesar: will you 
go down to posterity as a barbar- 
ous soldier too Ignorant to know the 
value of books? 

C^SAR. Theodotus: I am an author 

\ myself; and I tell you It Is better that 

\ the Egyptians should live their lives 

^ than dream them away with the help 

of books. 

THEODOTUS [kneeling, with genuine lit- 
erary emotion: the passion of the ped- 
ant'] Caesar: once In ten generations of 
men the world gains an Immortal book. 
C^SAR [inflexible] If It did not flatter 
mankind, the common executioner 
would burn it. 

THEODOTUS. Without history, death 
will lay you beside your meanest soldier. 

^ The library of Alexandria is in flames. Theodotus 
asks for soldiers to extinguish them. 

48 



C^SAR. Death will do that In any case. 

I ask no better grave. 

THEODOTUS. What is burning there is 

the memory of mankind. 

c^SAR. A shameful memory. Let it 

burn. 

THEODOTUS [wildly] Will you destroy 

the past? 

c.^SAR. Ay, and build the future with 

Its ruins. Casar and Cleopatra, p. 

132. _^^ 

'T^HE way to get at the merits of a Both sides 

case is not to listen to the fool who 
imagines himself impartial, but to get 
it argued with reckless bias for and 
against. To understand a saint, you 
must hear the devil's advocate; and the 
same is true of the artist. The Sanity 
of Art, p. 4. 

' I *HE reason why Shakespear and gj^ljf^^^. 
Moliere are always well spoken of SfnHomt 
and recommended to the young is that \| 
their quarrel is really a quarrel with 

49 



God for not making men better. If 
they had quarrelled with a specified class 
of persons with incomes of four figures 
for not doing their work better, or for 
doing no work at all, they would be de- 
nounced as seditious, impious, and prof- 
ligate corrupters of morality. Three 
Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. xvii. 

pUT your Shakespearian hero and 
coward, Henry V. and Pistol or 
ParoUes, beside Mr. Valiant and Mr. 
Fearing, and you have a sudden revela- 
tion of the abyss that lies between the 
fashionable author who could see noth- 
ing in the world but personal aims and 
the tragedy of their disappointment or 
the comedy of their incongruity, and the 
field preacher who achieved virtue and 
courage by Identifying himself with the 
purpose of the world as he understood 
it. The contrast Is enormous: Bunyan's 
coward stirs your blood more than 
Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves 
you cold and secretly hostile. You sud- 

50 



denly see that Shakespear, with all his 
flashes and divinations, never under- 
stood virtue and courage, never con- 
ceived how any man who was not a fool 
could, like Bunyan's hero, look back 
from the brink of the river of death 
over the strife and labor of his pilgrim- 
age, and say " yet do I not repent me " ; 
or, with the panache of a millionaire, 
bequeath " my sword to him that shall 
succeed me In my pilgrimage, and my 
courage and skill to him that can get 
it." This is the true joy In life, the be- 
ing used for a purpose recognized by 
yourself as a mighty one; the being 
thoroughly worn out before you are 
thrown on the scrap heap; the being a 
force of Nature Instead of a feverish 
selfish little clod of ailments and griev- 
ances complaining that the world will 
not devote Itself to making you happy. 
And also the only real tragedy In life Is 
the being used by personally minded 
men for purposes which you recognize 
to be base. All the rest Is at worst 

51 



mere misfortune or mortality: this alone 
is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the 
revolt against It is the only force that 
offers a man's work to the poor artist, 
whom our personally minded rich peo- 
ple would so willingly employ as pan- 
dar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimen- 
tallzer and the like. Man and Super- 
man, pp. xxxi., xxxii. 



Children 
and 



/^UR duty to our school-children is 
ReTigious ^^ clear enough. Just as we teach 
ng ^i^gj^ |.|^^^ ^j^g various races and classes 
and colors of men have such and such 
customs and laws and habits differing 
from our own, so we should teach them 
that there exist In the world divers 
creeds and observances, theories of 
morals, and views as to the origin and 
destiny of life and the moral sanctions 
of conduct. And we should add that 
these differences do not connote differ- 
ences of what children call goodness and 
badness, and that quite as good men 
and women, and even (which they will, 

52 



perhaps, find It harder to believe) just 
as bad men and women, are to be found 
among " heathens " as among their own 
fathers and mothers. That is all we 
have any right to teach children about 
creeds nowadays. The Daily News, 
25th August 1902. 

■ I 1 
npHE problem being to make heroes Christianity 

out of cowards, we paper apostles 
and artist-magicians have succeeded 
only in giving cowards all the sensations 
of heroes whilst they tolerate every ^^ 
abomination, accept every plunder, and 
submit to every oppression. Christian- 
ity in making a merit of such submis- 
sion, has marked only that depth in the 
abyss at which the very sense of shame 
is lost. The Christian has been like 
Dickens' doctor in the debtor's prison, 
who tells the newcomer of its ineffable 
peace and security: no duns; no tyran- 
nical collectors of rates, taxes and rent; 
no importunate hopes nor exacting 
duties; nothing but the rest and safety 

53 



stances 



of having no further to fall. Major \ 
Barbara, p. 179. , 

Christmas r^QURAGE, f Hcnd ! We all loathe 
Christmas; but it comes only oncej 
a year and is soon over. Christmas 
Card. i; 

Citizenship JT Is QuItc usclcss to dcclarc that all; 

and I ^ . . . J , 

circum- xxitn are born tree 11 you deny tnati 

they are born good. Guarantee a man s! 
goodness and his liberty will take care; 
of itself. To guarantee his freedom oni 
condition that you approve of his moral 
character is formally to abolish all free- 
dom whatsoever, as every man's liberty 
Is at the mercy of a moral indictment, 
which any fool can trump up against 
everyone who violates custom, whether 
as a prophet or as a rascal. This Is 
the lesson Democracy has to learn be- 
fore it can become anything but the most 
oppressive of all the priesthoods. Ma- 
jor Barbara, p. 187. 

54 



Every practicable man (and woman) Is 
a potential scoundrel and a potential 
good citizen. What a man Is depends 
on his character; but what he does, and 
what we think of what he does, depends 
on his circumstances. Major Barbara, 
p. 185. 

Take the utmost care to get well born 
and well brought up. This means that 
your mother must have a good doctor. 
Be careful to go to a school where there 
Is what they call a school clinic, where 
your nutrition and teeth and eyesight 
and other matters of Importance to you 
will be attended to. Be particularly 
careful to have all this done at the ex- 
pense of the nation, as otherwise It will 
not be done at all, the chances being 
about forty to one against your being 
able to pay for It directly yourself, even 
If you know how to set about It. Other- 
wise you will be what most people are 
at present: an unsound citizen of an un- 
sound nation, without sense enough to 

55 



be ashamed or unhappy about it. The 
Doctor's Dilemma, p. xcli. 

Conscience T UST as the llar's punishment is, not 
J in the least that he is not believed, 
but that he cannot believe any one else, 
so a guilty society can more easily be 
persuaded that any apparently innocent 
act is guilty than that any apparently 
guilty act is innocent. Quintessence of 
Ibsenism, p. 2. 

Con- O RITANNUS [shocked] Csser: this 

ventional I J • , 

Morality IS nOt prOpcr. 

THEODOTUS [outraged] How! 
C^SAR. Pardon him, Theodotus : he is 
a barbarian and thinks that the customs 
of his tribe and island are the laws of 
nature. Casar and Cleopatra, p. 119. 

Surely the time is past for patience with 
writers who, having to choose between 
giving up life in despair and discarding 
the trumpery moral kitchen scales in 
which they try to weigh the universe, 

56 



^ 



superstitlously stick to the scales, and 
spend the rest of the lives they pretend 
to despise in breaking men's spirits. 
Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxviii. 

The truth is, laws, religions, creeds, and 
systems of ethics, instead of making so- 
ciety better than its best unit, make it 
worse than its average unit, because 
they are never up to date. You will ask 
me: " Why have them at all? " I will 
tell you. They are made necessary, 
though we all secretly detest them, by 
the fact that the number of people 
who can think out a line of conduct for 
themselves even on one point is very 
small, and the number who can afford 
the time for it still smaller. Nobody 
can afford the time to do it on all points. 
The professional thinker may on occa- 
sion make his own morality and philos- 
ophy as the cobbler may make his own 
boots; but the ordinary man of business 
must buy at the shop, so to speak, and 
put up with what he finds on sale there, 

57 



\ 



whether It exactly suits him or not, be- 
cause he can neither make a morahty for 
himself nor do without one. The San- 
ity of Art J p. 46. 

Remember, the objection to all progress 
Is that It Is Immoral. Correspondence. 

Bunyan's perception that righteousness 
Is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr. Legality 
In the village of Morality, his defiance 
of the Church as the supplanter of re- 
ligion, his Insistence on courage as the 
virtue of virtues, his estimate of the 
career of the conventionally respectable 
and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no 
better at bottom than the life and death 
of Mr. Badman: all this, expressed by 
Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theol- 
ogy. Is what Nietzsche has expressed 
in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Scho- 
penhauerian philosophy; Wagner In 
terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ib- 
sen in terms of mid-nineteenth century 
Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing Is new In 
these matters except their novelties: for 

58 ! 



instance, It Is a novelty to call Justifica- 
tion by Faith " Wllle," and Justification 
by Works " Vorstellung." The sole 
use of the novelty is that you and I buy 
and read Schopenhauer's treatise on Will 
and Representation when we should not 
dream of buying a set of sermons on 
Faith versus Works. At bottom the 
controversy Is the same, and the dra- 
matic results are the same. Bunyan 
makes no attempt to present his pilgrims 
as more sensible or better conducted 
than Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Mr. W. 
W.'s worst enemies, Mr. Embezzler, 
Mr. Never-go-to-Church-on-S u n d a y, 
Mr. Bad Form, Mr. Murderer, Mr. 
Burglar, Mr. Correspondent, Mr. 
Blackmailer, Mr. Cad, Mr. Drunkard, 
Mr. Labor Agitator and so forth, can 
read the Pilgrim's Progress without 
finding a word said against them; 
whereas the respectable people who snub 
them and put them In prison, such as 
Mr. W. W. himself and his young 
friend Civility; Formalist and Hypoc- 

59 



risy; Wlldhead, Inconsiderate, and 
Pragmatick (who were clearly young 
university men of good family and high 
feeding) ; that brisk lad Ignorance, 
Talkative, By-Ends of Fairspeech and 
his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and 
other reputable gentlemen and citizens, 
catch it very severely. Even Little 
Faith, though he gets to heaven at last, 
is given to understand that it served him 
right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint 
Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three 
recognized members of respectable so- 
ciety and veritable pillars of the law. 
The whole allegory is a consistent at- 
tack on morality and respectability, 
without a word that one can remember 
against vice and crime. Exactly what 
is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, 
is it not? Man and Superman, pp. 
xxxii., xxxiii. 

Courage A ND now, supposc you had done all 
'^ this — suppose you had come safely 
out with that letter in your hand, know- 

60 



Ing that when the hour came, your fear 
had tightened, not your heart, but your 
grip of your own purpose — that It had 
ceased to be fear, and had become 
strength, penetration, vigilance. Iron 
resolution — how would you answer then 
If you were asked whether you were a 
coward? The Man of Destiny, p. i86. 



C UCH abominations as the Inquisition cowardice 

and the Vaccination Acts are possible 
only In the famine years of the soul, when 
the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, 
courage, the kinship of all life, faith that 
the unknown Is greater than the known 
and Is only the As Yet Unknown, and 
resolution to find a manly highway to It, 
have been forgotten In a paroxysm of lit- 
tleness and terror In which nothing Is ac- 
tive except concupiscence and the fear of 
death, playing on which any trader can 
filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify 
his cruelty, and any tyrant make us his 
slaves. The Doctor s Dilemma, p. xc. 
6i 



Buffer States at one end of the scale, 
dog muzzles at the other; between, the 
whole gamut of human cowardice, with 
" I'honneur de I'armee " and " our gal- 
lant Tommies " for keynote. And yet 
this poor trembling creature, Man, can- 
not rest or retreat, and must brag and 
dare — must even seek concrete danger 
as a relief from superstitious fear, just 
as men sometimes commit suicide to es- 
cape from the dread of death. 

Civilization and the Soldier. The 

Humane Review, January 1901, 

p. 304. 



cri^nai "R ^- -^"^ ^^ ^^ ^° ^^ allowed to de- 
Law -'-'• fy the criminal law of the land? 

SIR PATRICK. The criminal law is no 
use to decent people. It only helps 
blackguards to blackmail their families. 
What are we family doctors doing half 
our time but conspiring with the family 
solicitor to keep some rascal out of jail 
and some family out of disgrace? 
B. B. But at least it will punish him. 
62 



SIR PATRICK. Oh yes: itll punish him. 
Itll punish not only him but everybody 
connected with him, innocent and guilty 
alike. Itll throw his board and lodg- 
ing on our rates and taxes for a couple 
of years, and then turn him loose on 
us a more dangerous blackguard than 
ever. Itll put the girl in prison and 
ruin her; itll lay his wife's life waste. 
You may put the criminal law out of 
your head once for all: it's only fit for 
fools and savages. 

The Doctor' s Dilemma^ p. 72. 

TF you are clever enough to construct criticism 

one of those dolls which close their 
eyes when you lay them on their backs, 
and speak plaintively when you nip them 
in the epigastric region, any imaginative 
little girl will explain to you at great 
length and in minute detail how the doll 
got tired and sleepy, and what it means 
by the squeak. The most popular dra- 
matic criticisms of to-day are stories of 
dolls, prettily invented and touchingly 

63 



told. And when you give the critic a 
woman to criticize instead of a doll, 
and scenes from real life instead of turns 
of the stageland kaleidoscope to con- 
sider, he protests that you are confront- 
ing him with the morbid, the unmanage- 
able, the diseased. 
The Saturday Review, 20th July 1895. 

Criticism may be pardoned for every 
mistake except that of not knowing a 
man of rank in literature when it meets 
one. The Saturday Review^ 30th Jan- 
uary 1897. 

The Crows \ FTER Shakcspcar, the dramatists 

that Follow h\. • ^U -u' r C U £u 

the "^ were m the position or Spohr after 

Plough Mozart. A ravishing secular art had 
been opened up to them, and was refin- 
ing their senses and ennobling their ro- 
mantic illusions and enthusiasms instead 
of merely stirring up their basest pas- 
sions. Cultivated lovers of the beauties 
of Shakespear's art — true amateurs, in 
fact — took the place of the Marlovian 

64 



crew. Such amateurs, let loose In a 
field newly reaped by a great master, 
have always been able to glean some 
dropped ears, and even to raise a brief 
aftermath. In this way the world has 
gained many charming and fanciful, 
though not really original, works of art 
— blank verse dramas after Shakespear, 
rhetorical frescoes after Raphael, fugues 
after Bach, operas after Mozart, sym- 
phonies after Beethoven, and so on. 
This, I take It, Is the distinction between 
Marlowe and Company and the firm of 
Beaumont and Fletcher. The pair wrote 
a good deal that was pretty disgraceful; 
but at all events they had been educated 
out of the possibility of writing Titus 
Andronlcus. They had no depth, no 
conviction, no religious or philosophic 
basis, no real power or seriousness — 
Shakespear himself was a poor master 
In such matters — but they were dainty 
romantic poets, and really humorous 
character-sketchers In Shakespear's pop- 
ular style : that Is, they neither knew nor 

6s 



cared anything about human psychology, 
but they could mimic the tricks and man- 
ners of their neighbors, especially the 
vulgarer ones, in a highly entertaining 
way. The Saturday Review, 19th Feb- 
ruary 1898. 

Cruelty T ^JT US not shrink from the fact that 
cruelty is^ne of the primitive pleas- 
ures of mankind, and that the detection 
J of its Protean disguises as law, educa- 

tion, medicine, discipline, sport and so 
forth. Is one of the most , difficult of 
the unending tasks of the legislator. 

The Doctor's Dilemma^ p. xllv. 



Democracy "j^ERO was popular wIth the people: 
-^ his despotism reached them only In 
the shape of splendid entertainments. 
His government was so unrepresentative, 
so undemocratic, that it was no govern- 
ment at all: the moment the people Im- 
mediately about Nero had the sense to 
tell him that If he did not cut his own 
66 



throat they would save him the trouble, 
he had to obey like the meanest gladi- 
ator. To attain real power, he should 
have made himself the keystone of an 
oligarchy. To attain extensive power 
that oligarchy would have had to make 
itself the keystone of a democracy. Let 
me put this evolutionary process in 
blunter terms. An assassin may be 
feared and dreaded; but he can enjoy 
neither power nor safety. To escape 
from this position he associates other 
assassins with him and becomes a brig- 
and. To make brigandage pay, it Is 
soon necessary to resort to blackmail, 
and protect travellers who pay for pro- 
tection. Thus the brigands, with the 
worst possible intentions, find themselves 
transformed into a police force. At 
last they become regular policemen as 
poachers become gamekeepers. At 
which point their power reaches its max- 
imum. Hence the paradox that Democ- 
racy represents the extreme of possible 
State tyranny. Unpublished. 

(>7 



Democracy Is really only an arrange- 
ment by which the whole people are 
given a certain share in the control of 
the government. It has never been 
proved that this is ideally the best ar- 
rangement : it became necessary because 
the people willed to have it; and it has 
been made effective only to the very 
limited extent short of which the dis- 
satisfaction of the majority would have 
taken the form of actual violence. Now 
when men had to submit to kings, they 
consoled themselves by making it an 
article of faith that the king was always 
right — Idealized him as a Pope, In fact. 
In the same way we who have to submit 
to majorities set up Voltaire's pope, 
" Monsieur Tout-le-monde," and make 
it blasphemy against Democracy to deny 
that the majority Is always right, al- 
though that, as Ibsen says, is a lie. It 
Is a scientific fact that the majority, how- 
ever eager It may be for the reform of 
old abuses. Is always wrong In Its opinion 
of new developments, or rather is al- 
68 



ways unfit for them (for It can hardly 
be said to be wrong In opposing de- 
velopments for which It Is not yet fit). 
The pioneer Is a tiny minority for the 
force he heads; and so, though It Is 
easy to be In a minority and yet be 
wrong, It Is absolutely Impossible to be 
In the majority and yet be right as to 
the newest social prospects. We should 
never progress at all if it were possible 
for each of us to stand still on demo- 
cratic principles until we saw whither all 
the rest were moving, as our statesmen 
declare themselves bound to do when 
they are called upon to lead. What- 
ever clatter we may make for a time 
with our filing through feudal serf col- 
lars and kicking off rusty capitalistic fet- 
ters, we shall never march a step for- 
ward except at the heels of " the strong- 
est man, he who is able to stand alone " 
and to turn his back on " the damned 
compact Liberal majority." All of 
which Is no disparagement of adult suf- 
frage, payment of members, annual par- 

69 



llaments and so on, but simply a whole- 
some reduction of them to their real 
place in the social economy as pure ma- 
chinery — machinery which has absolute- 
ly no principles except the principles of 
mechanics, and no motive power in it- 
self whatsoever. The idealization of 
public organizations is as dangerous as 
that of kings or priests. We need to be 
reminded that though there is in the 
world a vast number of buildings in 
which a certain ritual is conducted be- 
fore crowds called congregations by a 
functionary called a priest, who is sub- 
ject to a central council controlling all 
such functionaries on a few points, there 
is not therefore any such thing in re- 
ality as the ideal Catholic Church, nor 
ever was, nor ever will be. There may, 
too, be a highly elaborate organization 
of public affairs; but there is no such 
thing as the ideal State. All abstrac- 
tions invested with collective conscious- 
ness or collective authority, set above 
the individual, and exacting duty from 
70 



him on pretence of acting or thinking 
with greater validity than he, are man- 
eating idols red with human sacrifices. 
Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 97, 98, 

99. 

We must either breed political ca- 
pacity or be ruined by Democracy, which 
was forced on us by the failure of the 
older alternatives. Yet If Despotism 
failed only for want of a capable be- 
nevolent despot, what chance has De- 
mocracy, which requires a whole popu- 
lation of capable voters: that is, of 
political critics who. If they cannot gov- 
ern in person for lack of spare energy 
or specific talent for administration, can 
at least recognize and appreciate capac- 
ity and benevolence in others, and so 
govern through capably benevolent rep- 
resentatives? Where are such voters 
to be found to-day? Nowhere. Pro- 
miscuous breeding has produced a weak- 
ness of character that Is too timid to 
face the full stringency of a thoroughly 

71 



competitive struggle for existence and 
too lazy and petty to organize the com- 
monwealth co-operatively. Being cow- 
ards, we defeat natural selection under 
cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, 
we neglect artificial selection under cover 
of delicacy and morality. 

Man and Superman, p. xxiv. 

Real democracy is impossible without 
public opinion. And In our system 
the difficulty Is not, as we so often 
say, that public opinion Is not enlight- 
ened. The difficulty Is that public opin- 
ion does not exist. There Is literally 
no such thing. Opinion means a view 
of the world; and a view of the world 
means an Income. Unpublished. 

Democracy HpHERE Is Only onc condltlon on 
Justice -■> which a man can do justice between 
two litigants, and that is that he shall 
have no interest in common with either 
of them, whereas it is only by having 
every Interest in common with both of 

72 



them that he can govern them tolerably. 
The indispensable preliminary to Democ- 
racy is the representation of every in- 
terest: the indispensable preliminary to 
justice is the elimination of every In- 
terest. 

John BuU's Other Island, p. xxvii. 

r\ON JUAN [to the Devil] Pooh! The.^,^ 
'^ why should I be civil to them or FrilLds 
to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth 
or two will not hurt you. Your friends 
are all the dullest dogs I know. They 
are not beautiful: they are only deco- 
rated. They are not clean : they are 
only shaved and starched. They are 
not dignified: they are only fashionably 
dressed. They are not educated: they 
are only college passmen. They are not 
religious: they are only pewrenters. 
They are not moral : they are only con- 
ventional. They are not virtuous: they 
are only cowardly. They are not even 
vicious: they are only "frail." They 
are not artistic: they are only lascivious. 

73 



They are not prosperous : they are only 
rich. They are not loyal, they are only 
servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not 
public spirited, only patriotic; not cour- 
ageous, only quarrelsome; not deter- 
mined, only obstinate; not masterful, 
only domineering; not self-controlled, 
only obtuse; not self-respecting, only 
vain; not kind, only sentimental; not so- 
cial, only gregarious; not considerate, 
only poHte; not intelligent, only opin- 
ionated; not progressive, only factious; 
not imaginative, only superstitious; not 
just, only vindictive ; not generous, only 
propitiatory; not disciplined, only 
cowed; and not truthful at all — liars 
every one of them, to the very backbone 
of their souls. Man and Superman, 

P- 130- _^^ 

Discipune T g^Y that Certain things are to be 

done; but I dont order anybody to 

do them. I dont say, mind you, that 

there Is no ordering about and snubbing 

and even bullying. The men snub the 

74 



boys and order them about; the car- 
men snub the sweepers ; the artisans snub 
the unskilled laborers; the foremen 
drive and bully both the laborers and 
artisans; the assistant engineers find fault 
with the foremen; the chief engineers 
drop on the assistants; the departmental 
managers worry the chiefs; and the 
clerks have tall hats and hymnbooks and 
keep up the social tone by refusing to 
associate on equal terms with anybody. 
The result is a colossal profit, which 
comes to me. Major Barbara^ p. 283. 

According to the disciplinarian theory, 
the captain of a cruiser ought to be the 
most absolute autocrat, and the secre- 
tary of a trade-union the most abject 
slave In Engjand. As a matter of fact 
It Is the captain who is the slave and 
the secretary who is the autocrat. 

Correspondence. 

"fyiARCHBANKS. Do you think D^scr^m- 
that the things people make fools '"^'°°^ 

75 



of themselves about are any less real 
and true than the things they behave 
sensibly about? Candida, p. loS. 

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the 
unsound. Man and Superman , p. 243. 

He who confuses political liberty with 
freedom and political equality with sim- 
ilarity has never thought for five min- 
utes about either. 

Man and Superman^ p. 229. 

Any fool can scoff. The serious matter 
is which side you scoff at. Scoffing at 
pretentious dufferdom is a public duty: 
scoffing at an advancing torchbearer is 
a deadly sin. The men who praised 
Shakespear in my time were mostly the 
men who would have stoned him had 
they been his contemporaries. To praise 
him saved them the trouble of thinking; 
got them the credit of correct and pro- 
found opinions; and enabled them to 
pass as men of taste when they explained 
that Ibsen was an obscene dullard. To 

76 



expose these humbugs and to rescue the 
real Shakespear from them, it was nec- 
essary to shatter their idol. It has taken 
the iconoclasm of three generations of 
Bible smashers to restore Hebrew liter- 
ature to us, after three hundred years 
of regarding the volume into which it 
was bound as a fetish and a talisman; 
and it will take as many generations of 
Shakespear smashers before we can 
read the plays of Shakespear with as 
free minds as we read The Nation. 

The Nation, 2nd April 19 lo. 

When a man wants to murder a tiger 
he calls it sport: when the tiger wants 
to murder him he calls it ferocity. The 
distinction between Crime and Justice 
is no greater. 

Man and Superman, p. 232. 

Go on to Florence and try San Lorenzo, 
a really noble church (which the Milan 
Cathedral is not) , Brunelleschi's master- 
piece. You cannot but admire its in- 
tellectual command of form, its unaf- 

77 



fected dignity, its power and accomplish- 
ment, its masterly combination of sim- 
plicity and homogeneity of plan with ele- 
gance and variety of detail: you are even 
touched by the retention of that part of 
the beauty of the older time which was 
perceptible to the Renascent intellect be- 
fore its weaning from heavenly food had 
been followed by starvation. You un- 
derstand the deep and serious respect 
which Michael Angelo had for Brunel- 
leschi — why he said " I can do different 
work, but not better." But a few min- 
utes' walk to Santa Maria Novella or 
Santa Croce, or a turn in the steamtram 
to San Miniato, will bring you to 
churches built a century or two earlier: 
and you have only to cross their thresh- 
olds to feel, almost before you have 
smelt the incense, the difference between 
a church built to the pride and glory 
of God (not to mention the Medici) 
and one built as a sanctuary shielded by 
God's presence from pride and glory and 
all the other burdens of Hfe. In San 

78 



Lorenzo up goes your head — every Iso- 
lating advantage you have of talent, 
power or rank asserts Itself with thrill- 
ing poignancy. In the older churches 
you forget yourself, and are the equal 
of the beggar at the door, standing on 
ground made holy by that labor in which 
we have discovered the reality of prayer. 
On Going to Church. The Savoy, Jan- 
uary 1896, pp. 19, 20. 

What is wrong with priests and popes is 
that instead of being apostles and saints, 
they are nothing but empirics who say 
" I know " instead of " I am learning," 
and pray for credulity and inertia as wise 
men pray for scepticism and activity. 
The Doctor's Dilemma^ p. xc. 

An Englishman never asks what he is 
doing or why he is doing it. He pre- 
fers not to know, as he suspects that 
whatever it Is, it is something wrong. 
The Scotchman, nurtured on the Shoiter 
Catechism, is able to use his brains, and 

79 



therefore likes using them. He attacks 
the problem of life with an appetite. 
The Irishman, on the other hand, knows 
what he is doing without any study of 
the subject whatever. The result is 
that he often gets there before the re- 
flective Scotchman or the recalcitrant 
Englishman. Life, Literature and Po- 
litical Economy. Clare Market Re- 
view^ January 1906, p. 31. 

SCHUTZMACHER. When an Englishman 
borrows, all he knows or cares is that he 
wants money; and he'll sign anything 
to get it, without in the least understand- 
ing it, or intending to carry out the 
agreement if it turns out badly for him. 
In fact he thinks you a cad If you ask 
him to carry It out under such circum- 
stances. Just like the Merchant of Ven- 
ice, you know. But if a Jew makes an 
agreement, he means to keep it and ex- 
pects you to keep it. If he wants money 
for a time, he borrows It and knows 
he must pay It at the end of the time. 
80 



If he knows he can't pay, he begs it as 
a gift. The Doctor's Dilenuna^ P- S^- 

UNDERSHAFT. You have learnt some- 
thing. That always feels at first as If 
you had lost something. 

Major Barbara^ p. 284. 

UNDERSHAFT {with grave compassion'] 
You see, my dear, it Is only the big men 
who can be treated as children. 

Major Barbara^ p. 277. 

An Englishman reading Caesar's books 
would say that Caesar was a man of / 
great common sense and good taste, y/ 
meaning thereby a man without original- 
ity or moral courage. 

Three Plays for Puritans^ p. 205. 

Originality gives a man an air of frank- 
ness, generosity and magnanimity by 
enabling him to estimate the value of 
truth, money, or success in any particu- 
lar Instance quite independently of con- 
vention and moral generalization. He 
81 



therefore will not, In the ordinary Treas- 
ury Bench fashion, tell a He which every- 
body knows to be a He (and consequent- 
ly expects him as a matter of good taste 
to tell). His lies are not found out: 
^ey pass for candors. He understands || 
the paradox of money, and gives It awayi 
when he can get most for It; In other! 
words, when Its value is least, which Is 
just when a common man tries hardest 
to get It. He knows that the real mo- 
ment of success is not the moment ap- 
parent to the crowd. Hence, In order 
to produce an Impression of complete 
disinterestedness and magnanimity, he 
has only to act with entire selfishness, 
and this is perhaps the only sense in 
which a man can be said to be naturally 
great. 

It is in this sense that I have repre- 
sented Caesar as great. Having virtue, 
he has no need of goodness. He Is 
neither forgiving, frank, nor generous, 
because a man who Is too great to resent 
has nothing to forgive ; a man who says 
82 



things that other people are afraid to 
say need be no more frank than Bis- 
marck was; and there is no generosity 
in giving things you do not want to 
people of whom you intend to make use. 
This distinction between virtue and 
goodness is not understood in England: 
hence the poverty of our drama in 
heroes. Our stage attempts at them are 
mere goody-goodies. Goodness, in its 
popular British sense of self-denial, im- 
plies that man is vicious by nature, and 
that supreme goodness is supreme mar- 
tyrdom. Not sharing that pious opin- 
ion, I have not given countenance to it 
in any of my plays. In this I follow 
the precedent of the ancient myths, 
which represent the hero as vanquishing 
his enemies, not in fair fight, but with 
enchanted sword, superequine horse and 
magic invulnerability, the possession of 
which, from the vulgar moralistic point 
of view, robs his exploits of any merit 
whatever. 
Three Plays for Puritans^ pp. 206, 207. 

83 



CENTURION [sulkily] I do my duty. 
That is enough for me. 
APOLLODORUS. Majesty: |ivhen a stu- 
i pid man Is doing something he is 
ashamed of, he always declares that it Is! 
his duty."\ Casar and Cleopatra, p. 144. 

^v What the world calls originality Is only 

an unaccustomed method of tickling It. 

Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxxvi. 

JOHNNY. The Governor's a wonder- 
ful man; but he's not quite all there, 
you know. If you notice, he's different 
from me ; and whatever my failings may 
be, I'm a sane man. Erratic: thats what 
he Is. And the danger Is that some day 
he'll give the whole show away. 
LORD SUMMERHAYS. Giving the show 
away is a method like any other method. 
Keeping It to yourself Is only another 
method. I should keep an open mind 
about It. 

JOHNNY. Has it ever occurred to you 

that a man with an open mind must be 

a bit of a scoundrel? If you ask me, 

84 



I like a man who makes up his mind 
once for all as to whats right and whats 
wrong and then sticks to it. At all 
events you know where to have him. 
LORD SUMMERHAYS. That may not be 
his object. 

BENTLEY. He may want to have you, 
old chap. 

JOHNNY. Well, let him. If a member 
of my club wants to steal my umbrella, 
he knows where to find it. If a man 
put up for the club who had an open 
mind on the subject of property in um- 
brellas, I should blackball him. An 
open mind is all very well in clever talky- 
talky; but in conduct and in business give 
me solid ground. 

LORD SUMMERHAYS. Yes : the quick- 
sands make life difficult. Still, there 
they are. It's no use pretending theyre 
rocks. 

JOHNNY. I dont know. You can draw 
a line and make other chaps toe it. 
Thats what I call morality. 

Misalliance (unpublished, 19 12). 

■ 85 



The test of a man or woman's breeding 
is how they behave in a quarrel. Any- 
body can behave well when things are 
going smoothly. 

The Philanderer y p. 151. 

The effect of deterrents depends much 
less on their severity than on their cer- 
tainty. 

The Free Lance, 25 th January 1902. 
■ I 1 
Sir''^ jV/IAMMON overreached himself 
menSi whcn he imposed his doctrine of 

Marriage inalienable property on the Church un- 
\ der the guise of indissoluble marriage. 
\ For the Church tried to shelter this in- 
4 human doctrine and flat contradiction of 
the gospel by claiming, and rightly claim- 
ing, that marriage is a sacrament. So 
it is; but that is exactly what makes di- 
vorce a duty when the marriage has lost 
the inward and spiritual grace of which 
the marriage ceremony is the outward 
and visible sign. In vain do bishops 
stoop to pick up the discarded arguments 
86 



of the atheists of fifty years ago by 
pleading that the words of Jesus were 
in an obscure Aramaic dialect, and were 
probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they 
think, could not have said anything a 
bishop would disapprove of. Unless 
they are prepared to add that the state- 
ment that those who take the sacrament 
with their lips but not with their hearts 
eat and drink their own damnation is 
also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, 
they are most solemnly bound to shield 
marriage from profanation, not merely 
by permitting divorce, but by making it 
compulsory in certain cases as the Chi- 
nese do. Getting Married^ p. 195. 

LIFE as it occurs is senseless: a po- The 
r 4. \^ ' i. ^ 1 • Dramatist 

liceman may watch it and work m 

it for thirty years In the streets and 

courts of Paris without learning as much 

of It or from It as a child or a nun may 

learn from a single play by Brieux. For 

It is the business of Brieux to pick out 

the significant incidents from the chaos 

87 



Duty 



of daily happenings, and arrange them 
so that their relation to one another 
becomes significant, thus changing us 
from bewildered spectators of a mon- 
strous confusion to men intelligently con- 
scious of the world and its destinies. 
This is the highest function that man 
can perform — the greatest work he can 
set his hand to ; and this Is why the 
great dramatists of the world, from Eu- 
ripides and Aristophanes to Shakespear 
and Moliere, and from them to Ibsen 
and Brieux, take that majestic and pon- 
tifical rank which seems so strangely 
above all the reasonable pretensions of 
mere strolling actors and theatrical au- 
thors. Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, 

p. XXV. 

AXTHAT, during all these overthrow- 
Ings of things sacred and things 
infallible, has been happening to that 
pre-eminently sanctified thing, Duty? 
Evidently it cannot have come off scathe- 
less. First there was man's duty to God, 



with the priest as assessor. That was 
repudiated; and then came Man's duty 
to his neighbor, with Society as the as- 
sessor. Will this too be repudiated, and 
be succeeded by Man's duty to himself, 
assessed by himself? And if so, what 
will be the effect on the conception of 
Duty in the abstract? Let us see. 
Duty arises at first, a gloomy tyranny, 
out of man's helplessness, his self-mis- 
trust, in a word, his abstract fear. He 
personifies all that he abstractly fears as 
God, and straightway becomes the slave 
of his duty to God. He imposes that 
slavery fiercely on his children, threat- 
ening them with hell, and punishing 
them for their attempts to be happy. 
When, becoming bolder, he ceases to 
fear everything, and dares to love some- 
thing, this duty of his to what he fears 
evolves into a sense of duty to what he 
loves. Sometimes he again personifies 
what he loves as God: and the God of 
Wrath becomes the God of Love; some- 
times he at once becomes a humanitarian, 

89 



an altruist, acknowledging only his duty 
to his neighbor. This stage is correla- 
tive to the rationalist stage in the evo- 
lution of philosophy and the capitalist 
phase in the evolution of industry. But 
in It the emancipated slave of God falls 
under the dominion of Society, which, 
having just reached a phase In which all 
the love is ground out of it by the com- 
petitive struggle for money, remorseless- 
ly crushes him until. In due course of the 
further growth of his spirit or will, a 
sense at last arises in him of his duty 
to himself. And when this sense is fully 
grown, which it hardly is. yet, the tyr- 
rany of duty is broken; for now the 
man's God Is himself; and he, self-sat- 
isfied at last, ceases to be selfish. The 
evangelist of this last step must there- 
fore preach the repudiation of duty. 
This, to the unprepared of his genera- 
tion, is Indeed the wanton masterpiece 
of paradox. What! after all that has 
been said by men of noble life as to the 
secret of all right conduct being only 
90 



*' Duty, duty, duty," is he to be told now 
that duty is the primal curse from which 
we must redeem ourselves before we can 
advance another step on the road along 
which, as we imagine — having forgot- 
ten the repudiations made by our fathers 
— duty and duty alone has brought us 
thus far? But why not? God was once 
the most sacred of our conceptions; and 
he had to be denied. Then Reason be- 
came the Infallible Pope, only to be 
deposed in turn. Is Duty more sacred 
than God or Reason? 
Quintessence of Ibsen'ism, pp. 17, 18. 

T BELIEVE that any society which Economic 
desires to found itself on a high dencr°' 
standard of integrity of character in its 
units should organize itself in such a 
fashion as to make it possible for all men 
and all women to maintain themselves 
in reasonable comfort by their industry 
without selling their affections and their 
convictions. Plays: Pleasant and Un- 
pleasant. Vol. I. Unpleasant^ p. xxvi. 

91 



The 

Economic 
Indepen- 
dence of 
Women 



Education 



P'AMILY life will never be decent, 
•*■ much less ennobling, until the central 
horror of the dependence of women on 
men Is done away with. At present It 
reduces the difference between mar- 
riage and prostitution to the difference 
between Trade Unionism and unorgan- 
ized casual labor: a huge difference, no 
doubt, as to order and comfort, but not 
a difference In kind. 

Getting Married^ p. 164. 

nPHE ruthless repression which we 
practise on our fellow-creatures 
whilst they are too small to defend them- 
selves, ends in their reaching their full 
bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and 
Intimidated condition, unable to conceive 
of any forces in the world except physi- 
cally coercive and socially conventional 
ones. 

Exactly In proportion as Parliament con- 
sists of thoroughly schooled men, do we 
find it given to shuffling and prevari- 
cation, and convinced that the world can 



92 



only be held together by flogging, pun- 
ishing, coercing and retaliating. And 
the exponents of this philosophy of cow- 
ardice are personally docile, abject to 
superior rank and royalty, horribly 
afraid to say, do, or think anything un- 
less they see everybody else setting them 
the example. Incapable of conceiving lib- 
erty and equality: In short, schoolboy- 
ish. That is, they are exactly what they 
have been educated to be from their 
weakest childhood; and they are every- 
where beaten in character and energy by 
the men who, through the poverty, care- 
lessness, or enlightenment of their par- 
ents, have more or less escaped educa- 
tion. Great communities are built by 
men who sign with a mark: they are 
wrecked by men who write Latin verses. 
Does Modern Education Ennoble? 
Great Thoughts, 7th October 1905, p. 6. 

People are said not to care for educa- 
tion; and this is true enough; but they 
would care for it if they were confronted 

93 



dally with an undeniably superior effi- 
ciency in the most expensively educated 
classes. What they actually are con- 
fronted with need not be described here : 
suffice it to say that no rational being can 
be conceived as willing to be rated an- 
other threepence in the pound to secure 
some more of it. Correspondence, 

LORD SUMMERHAYS. Reading is a dan- 
gerous amusement, Tarleton. I wish 
I could persuade some of your free li- 
brary people of that. 
TARLETON. Why, man, it's the begin- 
ning of education. 

LORD SUMMERHAYS. On the contrary, 
it's the end of it. How can you dare 
teach a man to read until you have 
taught him everything else first? 

Misalliance (unpublished, 19 12). 

And since what we call education and 
culture is for the most part nothing but 
the substitution of reading for experi- 
ence, of literature for life, of the obso- 
lete fictitious for the contemporary real, 

94 



education, as you no doubt observed at 
Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, 
every mind that Is not strong enough to 
see through the Imposture and to use the 
great Masters of Arts as what they 
really are and no more : that Is, patentees 
of highly questionable methods of think- 
ing, and manufacturers of highly ques- 
tionable, and for the majority but half 
valid representations of life. 

Man and Superman^ pp. xx., xxl. 



POWERFUL among the enemies of The 
Shakespear are the commentator ^^^'^^ 
and the elocutionist : the commentator 
because, not knowing Shakespear's lan- 
guage, he sharpens his reasoning faculty 
to examine propositions advanced by an 
eminent lecturer from the Midlands, In- 
stead of sensitizing his artistic faculty 
to receive the Impression of moods and 
Inflexions of feeling conveyed by word- 
music; the elocutionist because he Is a 
born fool. In which capacity, observing 

95 



with pain that poets have a weakness for 
imparting to their dramatic dialogue a 
quality which he describes and deplores 
as " sing-song," he devotes his life to 
the art of breaking up verse in such a 
way as to make it sound like insanely 
pompous prose. The effect of this on 
Shakespear's earlier verse, which Is full 
of the naive delight of pure oscillation, 
to be enjoyed as an Italian enjoys a barc- 
arolle, or a child a swing, or a baby 
a rocking-cradle, is destructively stupid. 
In the later plays, where the barcarolle 
measure has evolved into much more 
varied and complex rhythms, it does not 
matter so much since the work is no 
longer simple enough for a fool to pick 
to pieces. But in every play from Love's 
Labour's Lost to Henry V. the elocu- 
tionist meddles simply as a murderer, 
and ought to be dealt with as such with- 
out benefit of clergy. To our young 
people studying for the stage I say, with 
all solemnity, learn how to pronounce 
the English alphabet clearly and beauti- 

96 



fuily from some person who Is at once 
an artist and a phonetic expert. And 
then leave blank verse patiently alone 
until you have experienced emotion deep 
enough to crave for poetic expression, 
at which point verse will seem an abso- 
lutely natural and real form of speech to 
you. Meanwhile, If any pedant, with an 
uncultivated heart and a theoretic ear, 
proposes to teach you to recite, send in- 
stantly for the police. The Saturday Re- 
view, 2nd February 1895. 



-t-H- 



'X'O me the play Is only the means, the The End 
-*• end being the expression of feeling Sfe Mean 
by the arts of the actor, the poet, the 
musician. Anything that makes this ex- 
pression more vivid, whether It be versi- 
fication, or an orchestra, or a deliberately 
artificial delivery of the lines, is so much 
to the good for me, even though It may 
destroy all the verisimilitude of the scene. 
The Saturday Review, 13th April 1895. 



97 



Enlush T-f OME life as we understand it is no 
Home <*- -■' more natural to us than a cage is 
natural to a cockatoo. Its grave dan- 
ger to the nation lies in its narrow views, 
its unnaturally sustained and spitefully 
jealous concupiscences, its petty tyr- 
ranies, its false social pretences, its end- 
less grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice 
of the boy's future by setting him to 
earn money to help the family when he 
should be in training for his adult life 
(remember the boy Dickens and the 
blacking factory), and of the girl's 
chances by making her a slave to sick or 
selfish parents, its unnatural packing into 
little brick boxes of little parcels of hu- 
manity of ill-assorted ages, with the old 
scolding or beating the young for be- 
having like young people, and the young 
hating and thwarting the old for behav- 
ing like old people, and all the other 
ills, mentionable and unmentionable, 
that arise from excessive segregation. It 
sets these evils up as benefits and bless- 
ings representing the highest attainable 
98 



degree of honor and virtue, whilst any 
criticism of or revolt against them is 
savagely persecuted as the extremity of 
vice. The revolt, driven underground 
and exacerbated, produces debauchery 
veiled by hypocrisy, and overwhelming 
demand for licentious theatrical enter- 
tainments which no censorship can stem, 
and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue 
with the mere morality that steals its 
name until the real thing is loathed be- 
cause the imposture is loathsome. 

Getting Married^ pp. 132, 133. 

If on any night at the busiest part of 
the theatrical season in London the au- 
diences were cordoned by the police and 
examined individually as to their views 
on the subject, there would probably 
not be a single house-owning native 
among them who would not conceive a 
visit to the theatre, or indeed to any 
public assembly, artistic or political, as 
an exceptional way of spending an even- 
ing, the normal English way being to 

99 



sit in separate families in separate 
houses, each person silently occupied 
with a book, a paper, or a game of 
halma, cut off equally from the blessings 
of society and solitude. You may make 
the acquaintance of a thousand streets 
of middle-class English families without 
coming on a trace of any consciousness 
of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation 
of the senses. The condition of the men 
is bad enough, in spite of their daily 
escape into the city, because they carry 
the exclusive and unsocial habits of " the 
home " with them into the wider world 
of their business. Amiable and compan- 
ionable enough by nature, they are, by 
home training, so incredibly ill-man- 
nered, that not even their Interest, as 
men of business in welcoming a possible 
customer in every inquirer, can correct 
their habit of treating everybody who 
has not been " introduced " as a stran- 
ger and intruder. The women, who 
have not even the city to educate them, 
are much worse : they are positively un- 

100 



fit for civilized intercourse — graceless, 
ignorant, narrow-minded to a quite ap- 
palling degree. Plays: Pleasant and 
Unpleasant. Vol. I. Unpleasant, pp. 
xvii., xviii. 

J^APOLEON. No Englishman is 
too low to have scruples : no Eng- 
lishman is high enough to be free from 
their tyranny. But every Englishman 
is born with a certain miraculous power 
that makes him master of the world. 
When he wants a thing, he never tells 
himself that he wants it. He waits pa- 
tiently until there comes into his mind, 
no one knows how, a burning conviction 
that It Is his moral and religious duty 
to conquer those who have got the thing 
he wants. Then he becomes irresistible. 
Like the aristocrat, he does what pleases 
him and grabs what he covets : like the 
shopkeeper, he pursues his purpose with 
the industry and steadfastness that come 
from strong religious conviction and 

lOI 



\ 



deep sense of moral responsibility. He 
is never at a loss for an effective moral 
attitude. As the great champion of 
freedom and national independence, he 
conquers and annexes half the world, and 
calls it Colonization. When he wants 
a new market for his adulterated Man- 
chester goods, he sends a missionary to 
teach the natives the Gospel of Peace. 
The natives kill the missionary: he flies 
to arms in defence of Christianity; fights 
for it; conquers for it; and takes the 
market as a reward from heaven. In 
defence of his island shores, he puts a 
chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag 
with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; 
and sails to the ends of the earth, sink- 
ing, burning and destroying all who 
dispute the empire of the seas with him. 
He boasts that a slave is free the mo- 
ment his foot touches British soil; and 
he sells the children of his poor at six 
years of age to work under the lash in 
his factories for sixteen hours a day. 
He makes two revolutions, and then de- 



102 



dares war on our one in the name of law 
and order. There Is nothing so bad or 
so good that you will not find English- 
men doing it; but you will never find an 
Englishman in the wrong. He does 
everything on principle. He fights you 
on patriotic principles; he robs you on 
business principles; he enslaves you on 
imperial principles; he bullies you on 
manly principles; he supports his king 
on loyal principles and cuts off his king's 
head on republican principles. His 
watchword is always Duty; and he 
never forgets that the nation which lets 
its duty get on the opposite side to Its 
Interest Is lost. The Man of Destiny, 
pp. 212, 213. 

Englishmen . . . always lean sincerely 
to virtue's side as long as it costs them 
nothing either In money or In thought. 
They feel deeply the Injustice of for- 
eigners, who allow them no credit for 
this conditional high-mlndedness. 

Man and Superman^ p. 216. 
103 



■^^ 



Englishmen believe in nothing but the 
soldier, who is a positive nuisance, the 
gentleman, who Is a comparative nui- 
sance, and the lady, who is a superlative 
nuisance. And so I think the world will 
tire at last of the Englishman's stupidity, 
\ and send him back to his hovel, like the 
fisherman in the fairy tale who wanted 
to be lord of the sun and moon because 
his simpler virtues had been rewarded 
by a success or two. Civilization and 
the Soldier. The Humane Review, Jan- 
uary 1901, p. 314. 

It seems impossible to root out of an 
Englishman's mind the notion that vice 
is delightful, and that abstention from 
it is privation. The Author's Apology, 
Mrs. Warren's Profession, p. 29. 

DOYLE. A caterpillar when It gets Into 
a tree, instinctively makes itself look ex- 
actly like a leaf; so that both its ene- 
mies and its prey may mistake It for 
one and think It not worth bothering 
about. The world Is as full of fools 
104 



as a tree Is full of leaves. Well, the 
Englishman does what the caterpillar 
does. He instinctively makes himself 
look like a fool, and eats up all the real 
fools at his ease while his enemies let 
him alone and laugh at him for being 
a fool like the rest. Oh, nature is cun- 
ning, cunning ! 

John BulFs Other Island, p. 25. 

CETEWAYO. Are these anaemic dogs the 

English people? 

LUCIAN. Mislike us not for our com- 
plexions. 

The pallid liveries of the pall of smoke 

Belched by the mighty chimneys of our 
factories, 

And by the million patent kitchen ranges 

Of happy English homes. 

The Admirable Bashville, p. 37. 
- I - 1 

npHE Englishman is the most success- The 

ful man in the world simply be- anl^uJe 
cause he values success — meaning money spSt*^ 
and social precedence — more than any- 
105 



Englishman 



thing else, especially more than fine art, 
his attitude towards which, culture-affec- 
tation apart, is one of half diffident, 
half contemptuous curiosity; and of 
course more than clear-headedness, spir- 
itual insight, truth, justice and so forth. 
It is precisely this unscrupulousness and 
singleness of purpose that constitutes the 
Englishman's pre-eminent " common 
sense " ; and this sort of common sense, 
I submit to Mr. Meredith, is not only 
not " the basis of the comic," but actu- 
ally makes comedy impossible, because 
it would not seem like common sense at 
all if it were not self-satisfiedly uncon- 
scious of its moral and intellectual blunt- 
ness, whereas the function of comedy 
is to dispel such unconsciousness by turn- 
ing the searchlight of the keenest moral 
and intellectual analysis right on to it. 
Now the Frenchman, the Irishman, the 
American, the ancient Greek, Is disabled 
from this true British common sense by 
intellectual virtuosity, leading to a love 
of accurate and complete consciousness 
io6 



of things — of intellectual mastery of 
them. This produces a positive enjoy- 
ment of disillusion (the most dreaded 
and hated of calamities in England) and 
consequently a love of comedy (the fine 
art of disillusion) deep enough to make 
huge sacrifices of dearly idealized insti- 
tutions to It. Thus, in France, Moliere 
was allowed to destroy the Marquises. 
In England he could not have shaken 
even such titles as the accidental sher- 
iff's knighthood of the late Sir Augus- 
tus Harris. And yet the Englishman 
thinks himself much more Independent, 
level-headed, and genuinely republican 
than the Frenchman — not without good 
superficial reasons; for nations with the 
genius of comedy often carry all the 
snobbish ambitions and idealist enthusi- 
asms of the Englishman to an extreme 
which the Englishman himself laughs at. 
But they sacrifice them to comedy, to 
which the Englishman sacrifices nothing; 
so that. In the upshot, aristocracies, 
thrones and churches go by the board 
107 



at the attack of comedy among our de- 
votedly conventional, loyal and fanat- 
ical next door neighbors, whilst we, 
having absolutely no disinterested re- 
gard for such Institutions, draw a few 
of their sharpest teeth, and then main- 
tain them determinedly as part of the 
machinery of worldly success. 
The Englishman prides himself on this 
anti-comedic common sense of his as at 
least eminently practical. As a matter 
of fact. It Is just as often as not most 
pigheadedly unpractical. For example, 
electric telegraphy, telephony and trac- 
tion are invented, and establish them- 
selves as necessities of civilized life. 
The unpractical foreigner recognizes the 
fact, and takes the obvious step of put- 
ting up poles In his streets to carry wires. 
This expedient never occurs to the 
Briton. He wastes leagues of wire and 
does unheard-of damage to property by 
tying his wires and posts to such chim- 
ney stacks as he canbegullehouseholders 
into letting him have access to. Finally, 
1 08 



when It comes to electric traction, and 
the housetops are out of the question, he 
suddenly comes out in the novel charac- 
ter of an amateur in urban picturesque- 
ness, and declares that the necessary 
cable apparatus would spoil the appear- 
ance of our streets. The streets of Nu- 
remberg, the heights of Fiesole, may not 
be perceptibly the worse for these con- 
trivances ; but the beauty of Tottenham 
Court Road Is too sacred to be so pro- 
faned: to Its loveliness the strained bus- 
horse and his offal are the only acces- 
sories endurable by the beauty-loving 
Cockney eye. This is your common- 
sense Englishman. His helplessness in 
the face of electricity Is typical of his 
helplessness In the face of everything 
else that lies outside the set of habits he 
calls his opinions and capacities. In the 
theatre he is the same. It Is not common 
sense to laugh at your own prejudices : 
It Is common sense to feel insulted when 
any one else laughs at them. Besides, the 
Englishman Is a serious person: that Is, 

109 



he is firmly persuaded that his prejudices 
and stupidities are the vital material of 
civilization, and that it is only by hold- 
ing on to their moral prestige with the 
stiffest resolution that the world is saved 
from flying back into savagery and go- 
rilladom, which he always conceives, in 
spite of natural history, as a condition 
of lawlessness and promiscuity, instead 
of, as it actually is, the extremity, long 
since grown unbearable, of his own no- 
tions of law and order, morality and 
conventional respectability. Thus he is 
a moralist, an ascetic, a Christian, a 
truth-teller and a plain dealer by profes- 
sion and by conviction; and it is wholly 
against this conviction that, judged by 
his own canons, he finds himself in prac- 
tice a great rogue, a liar, an unconscion- 
able pirate, a grinder of the face of the 
poor, and a libertine. Mr. Meredith 
points out daintily that the cure for this 
self-treasonable confusion and darkness 
Is Comedy, whose spirit overhead will 
*' look humanely malign and cast an 

110 



oblique light on them, followed by vol- 
leys of silvery laughter." Yes, Mr. 
Meredith; but suppose the patients have 
" common sense " enough not to want to 
be cured! Suppose they realize the im- 
mense commercial advantage of keeping 
their ideal life and their practical busi- 
ness life in two separate conscience-tight 
compartments, which nothing but " the 
Comic Spirit " can knock into one ! Sup- 
pose, therefore, they dread the Comic 
Spirit more than anything else in the 
world, shrinking from its " illumina- 
tion," and considering its " silvery laugh- 
ter " in execrable taste ! Surely in 
doing so they are only carrying out the 
common-sense view, in which an encour- 
agement and enjoyment of comedy must 
appear as silly and suicidal and " un- 
English " as the conduct of the man who 
sets fire to his own house for the sake 
of seeing the flying sparks, the red glow 
in the sky, the fantastic shadows on 
the walls, the excitement of the crowd, 
the gleaming charge of the engines, and 



III 



the dismay of the neighbors. No doubt 
the day will come when we shall de- 
liberately burn a London street every 
day to keep our city up to date in health 
and handsomeness, with no more misgiv- 
ing as to our common sense than we now 
have when sending our clothes to the 
laundry every week. When that day 
comes, perhaps comedy will be popular 
too; for, after all, the function of com- 
edy, as Mr. Meredith after twenty years' 
further consideration is perhaps by this 
time ripe to admit, is nothing less than 
the destruction of old-established morals. 
Unfortunately, today such iconoclasm 
can be tolerated by our playgoing citi- 
zens only as a counsel of despair and 
pessimism. They can find a dreadful 
joy in it when it is done seriously, or 
even grimly and terribly as they under- 
stand Ibsen to be doing it; but that it 
should be done with levity, with silvery 
laughter like the crackling of thorns un- 
der a pot, is too scandalously wicked, 
too cynical, too heartlessly shocking to 

112 



be borne. Consequently our plays must 
either be exploitations of old-established 
morals or tragic challengings of the or- 
der of Nature. Reductions to absurd- 
ity, however logical; banterings, how- 
ever kindly; irony, however delicate; 
merriment, however silvery, are out of 
the question in matters of morality, ex- 
cept among men with a natural appetite 
for comedy which must be satisfied at 
all costs and hazards : that is to say, not 
among the English playgoing public, 
which positively dislikes comedy. 
No doubt it is patriotically indulgent 
of Mr. Meredith to say that " Our 
English school has not clearly imagined 
societ}%" and that " of the mind hover- 
ing above congregated men and women 
it has imagined nothing." But is he 
quite sure that the audiences of our Eng- 
lish school do not know too much about 
society and " congregated men and 
women " to encourage any exposures 
from " the vigilant Comic," with its 
" thoughtful laughter," its '' oblique II- 



lumination," and the rest of It? May it 
not occur to the purchasers of half- 
guinea stalls that it is bad enough to 
have to put up with the pryings of Fac- 
tory Inspectors, Public Analysts, County 
Council Inspectors, Chartered Account- 
ants and the like, without admitting this 
Comic Spirit to look Into still more deli- 
cate matters? Is It clear that the Comic 
Spirit would break into silvery laughter 
If it saw all that the nineteenth century 
has to show It beneath the veneer? 
There Is Ibsen, for Instance: he is not 
lacking, one judges, in the Comic Spirit; 
yet his laughter does not sound very 
silvery, does it? No: If this were an 
age for comedies, Mr. Meredith would 
have been asked for one before this. 
How would a comedy from him be rel- 
ished, I wonder, by the people who 
wanted to have the revisers of the Au- 
thorized Version of the Bible prosecuted 
for blasphemy because they corrected as 
many of its mistranslations as they dared, 
and who reviled Froude for not sup- 
114 



pressing Carlyle's diary and writing a 
fictitious biography of him, instead of 
letting out the truth? Comedy, indeed! 
I drop the subject with a hollow laugh. 
Saturday Review, 27th March 1897. 
- i -' i 

T^QUALITY is essential to good breed- Equality 
•*^ ing; and equality, as all economists 
know, is incompatible with property. 
Man and Superman, p. 186. 

I am not bound to keep my temper 
with an imposture so outrageous, so 
abjectly sycophantic, as the pretence that 
the existing inequalities of income corre- 
spond to and are produced by moral and 
physical inferiorities and superiorities 
— that Barnato was five million times as 
great and good a man as William Blake, 
and committed suicide because he lost 
two-fifths of his superiority; that the life 
of Lord Anglesey has been on a far 
higher plane than that of John Ruskin; 
that Mademoiselle Liane de Pougy has 
been raised by her successful sugar specu- 

115 



latlon to moral heights never attained 
by Florence Nightingale; and that an 
arrangement to establish economic equal- 
ity between them by duly adjusted pen- 
sions would be impossible. I say that 
no sane person can be expected to treat 
such impudent follies with patience, much 
less with respect. 

The evil resulting from the existing un- 
equal distribution of wealth is so enor- 
mous, so incalculably greater than any 
other evil, actual or conceivable, on the 
face of the earth, that it is our first duty 
to alter it into an equal distribution. 
The chief physical agent needed for the 
change is a sufficiency of cannon. The 
chief moral agent a sufficiency of charac- 
ter, which seems to be the difficulty so 
far, the nation exhibiting, instead of 
those diversities of opinion and capac- 
ity which so impress The Pall Mall Ga- 
zette, a dead level of baseness and tame- 
ness which makes it possible to drive 
men in flocks to fight over the question 
of the proprietorship of other countries 
ii6 



before we have dared even to raise the 

question of the proprietorship of our 

own. 

The Daily News, 8th December 1904. 

I - 1 - 
T F you lived in London, where the The 

whole system Is one of false good- Facto?*^ 
fellowship, and you may know a man 
for twenty years without finding out 
that he hates you like poison, you would 
soon have your eyes opened. There 
we do unkind things in a kind way: we , 

say bitter things in a sweet voice: we ^/ 
always give our friends chloroform ^ 

when we tear them to pieces. But 
think of the other side of it! Think 
of the people who do kind things In an 
unkind way — people whose touch hurts, 
whose voices jar, whose tempers play 
them false, who wound and worry the 
people they love in the very act of trying 
to conciliate them, and yet who need af- 
fection as much as the rest of us. Plays: 
Pleasant and Unpleasant. Vol. II. 
Pleasant, pp. 309, 310. 



Famous 
Actors 



BARRY SULLIVAN 

T) ARRY SULLIVAN was a splendld- 
■^ ly monstrous performer in his 
prime : there was hardly any part suffi- 
ciently heroic for him to be natural in it. 
He had deficiencies in his nature or 
rather blanks, but no weaknesses, be- 
cause he had what people call no heart. 
Being a fine man, as proud as Lucifer, 
and gifted with an intense energy which 
had enabled him to cultivate himself 
physically to a superb degree, he was the 
very incarnation of the old individual- 
istic, tyrannical conception of a great ac- 
tor. By magnifying that conception to 
sublimity, he reduced it to absurdity. 
There were just two serious parts which 
he could play — Hamlet and Richelieu — 
the two loveless parts in the grand rep- 
ertory. The Saturday Review, 14th 
December 1895. 

DUSE 

But in Duse you necessarily get the 

great school in its perfect integrity, be- 

118 



cause Duse without her genius would 
be a plain little woman of no use to any 
manager, whereas Miss Terry or Miss 
Achurch, If they had no more skill than 
can be acquired by any person of ordi- 
nary capacity In the course of a few 
years' experience, would always find a 
certain degree of favour as pretty lead- 
ing ladles. Duse with her genius, is so 
fascinating that it Is positively difficult 
to attend to the play instead of attend- 
ing wholly to her. The extraordinary 
richness of her art can only be under- 
stood by those who have studied the 
process by which an actress Is built up. 
You offer a part to a young lady who Is 
an enthusiastic beginner. She reads it 
devoutly, and forms, say, half a dozen 
great Ideas as to points which she will 
make. The difficulty then Is to Induce 
her to do nothing between these points; 
so that the play may be allowed at such 
moments to play itself. Probably when 
it comes to the point, these intervals 
will prove the only effective periods dur- 
119 



ing her performance, the points being ill 
chosen or awkwardly executed. The 
majority of actresses never get beyond 
learning not to invent new points for 
themselves, but rather to pick out In 
their parts the passages which admit of 
certain well worn and tried old points 
being reapphed. When they have learnt 
to make these points smoothly and to 
keep quiet between whiles with a grace- 
ful air of having good reasons for do- 
ing nothing, they are finished actresses. 
The great actress has a harder struggle. 
She goes on inventing her points and her 
business determinedly, constantly in- 
creasing the original half-dozen, and 
constantly executing them with greater 
force and smoothness. A time comes 
when she Is always making points, and 
making them well; and this Is the finish- 
ing point with some actresses. But with 
the greatest artists there soon com- 
mences an integration of the points into 
a continuous whole, at which stage the 
actress appears to make no points at all, 



and to proceed In the most unstudied 
and " natural " way. This rare con- 
summation Duse has reached. An at- 
tentive study of her Marguerite Gau- 
thier, for instance, by a highly trained 
observer of such things, will bring to 
light how its apparently simple strokes 
are combinations of a whole series of 
strokes, separately conceived originally, 
and added one by one to the part, un- 
til finally, after many years of evolu- 
tion, they have Integrated into one single 
highly complex stroke. Take, as a very 
simple illustration, the business of Ca- 
mille's tying up the flowers in the third 
act. It seems the most natural thing 
in the world; but it is really the final de- 
velopment of a highly evolved dance 
with the arms — even, when you watch 
it consciously, a rather prolonged and 
elaborate one. The strokes of charac- 
ter have grown up In just the same way. 
And this is the secret of the extraordi- 
nary interest of such acting. There are 
years of work, bodily and mental, be- 



hind every Instant of it — work, mind, 
not mere practice and habit, which Is 
quite a different thing. It Is the rarity 
of the gigantic energy needed to sustain 
this work which makes Duse so excep- 
tional; for the work Is In her case high- 
ly Intellectual work, and so requires 
energy of a quality altogether superior 
to the mere head of steam needed to 
produce Bernhardtlan explosions with 
the requisite regularity. With such 
high energy, mere personal fascination 
becomes a thing which the actress can 
put off and on like a garment. Sarah 
Bernhardt has nothing but her own 
charm, for the exhibition of which Sar- 
dou contrives love scenes — save the 
mark. Duse's own private charm has 
not yet been given to the public. She 
gives you Cesarlne's charm. Marguerite 
Gauthler's charm, the charm of La Lo- 
candlera, the charm, In short, belonging 
to the character she Impersonates; and 
you are enthralled by Its reality and de- 
lighted by the magical skill of the artist 



122 



without for a moment feeling any com- 
plicity either on your own part or hers 
In the passion represented. And with 
that clue to the consistency of supreme 
admiration for the artist with perfect 
respect for the woman — a combination 
so rare that some people doubt its pos- 
sibility — I must leave discussion of the 
plays she has appeared in this week to 
my next article. — The Saturday Review, 

8th June 1895. 

1 - 1 - 

ONE of the strongest objections to The 
^^ ' '^ ' r • Farcical 

the mstitution or monogamy is comedy 

the existence of Its offspring, the conven- 
tional farcical comedy. The old warn- 
ing, " Beware how you kiss when you 
do not love," ought to be paraphrased 
on the playbills of all our lighter 
theatres as " Beware how you laugh 
when you do not enjoy." To laugh 
without sympathy is a ruinous abuse of 
a noble function; and the degredation 
of any race may be measured by the de- 
gree of their addiction to it. In its 
123 



subtler forms it is dying very hard: for 
instance, we find people who would not 
join in the laughter of a crowd of peas- 
ants at the village idiot, or tolerate the 
public flogging or pillorying of a crim- 
inal, booking seats to shout with laugh- 
ter at a farcical comedy which is, at 
bottom, the same thing — namely, the 
deliberate indulgence of that horrible, 
derisive joy in humiliation and suffering 
which is the beastliest element in human 
nature. I make these portentous obser- 
vations not by way of breaking a but- 
terfly on a wheel, but in order to bring 
out with violent emphasis the distinction 
between the high and the base comedy 
of errors — between Pink Dominos and 
Twelfth Night; or, to illustrate from 
another art, between the caricatures of 
Leech or Gavarni and those which mark 
the last intolerable stages of the degra- 
dation of Ally Sloper (who in his or- 
iginal Ross-Duval days was not without 
his merits). To produce high art in 
the theatre, the author must create per- 
124 



sons whose fortunes we can follow as 
those of a friend or enemy: to produce 
base laughter, It is only necessary to 
turn human beings on to the stage as 
rats are turned Into a pit, that they may 
be worried for the entertainment of the 
spectators. The Saturday Review, 9th 
May 1896. 

Unless comedy touches me as well as 
amuses me, It leaves me with a sense of 
having wasted my evening. I go to the 
theatre to be moved to laughter, not to 
be tickled or bustled Into It; and that Is 
why, though I laugh as much as anybody 
at a farcical comedy, I am out of spirits 
before the end of the second act, and 
out of temper before the end of the 
third, my miserable mechanical laughter 
Intensifying these symptoms at every 
outburst. If the public ever becomes In- 
telligent enough to know when It Is really 
enjoying Itself and when It Is not, there 
win be an end of farcical comedy. The 
Saturday Review, 23d February, 1895. 

I2S 



Formulas 



\ 



1 ADY BRITOMART. In good so- 
•^ clety In England, Charles, men 
drivel at all ages by repeating silly form- 
ulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys 
make their own formulas out of slang, 
like you. When they reach your age, 
and get political private secretaryships 
and things of that sort, they drop slang 
and get their formulas out of The Spec- 
tator or The Times. You had better 
confine yourself to The Times. Major 
Barbara, p. 272. 



The God T KNOW that my " Ignorant and inex- 

Lad^es^ perlenced God " disgusts people who 

are accustomed to the best of every- 

\ \ thing. The old-fashioned gentleman 

X^ who felt that God would not lightly 

damn a man of his quality has given 

place to the lady who declines to be 

saved by a deity who Is not absolutely 

first-class In every particular. Sir Isaac 

Newton's confession of Ignorance and 

inexperience seems to her to mark a 

126 



lower grade of character and intelli- 
gence than the assurance of Mr. Stig- 
gins, who knows everything and can 
move mountains with his faith. I know 
this high-class deity very well. When 
I hire a furnished house for my holi- 
days, as I very often do, I find his por- 
trait in the best bedroom. It is the por- 
trait of a perfect gentleman, not older 
than thirty-eight, with nice hair, a nice 
beard, nice draperies, a nice pet lamb 
under his arm or somewhere about, and 
an expression which combines the tone 
of the best society wath the fascination 
of Wilson Barrett as Hamlet. The 
ladies who worship him are themselves 
worshipped by innumerable poor Job- 
lings in shabby lodgings who pin up the 
Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty on 
their walls. Far be it from me to mock 
at this worship: if you dare not or can- 
not look the universe in the face you will 
at least be the better for adoring that 
spark of the divine beauty and the eter- 
nal force that glimmers through the 
127 



weaknesses and inadequacies of a pretty 
man or a handsome woman; but please, 
dear sect of sweethearts, do not mock 
at me either. You have your nicely 
buttered little problem and are content 
with Its nicely buttered little solution. I 
have to face a larger problem and find 
a larger solution; and since on my scale 
the butter runs short I must serve the 
bread of life dry. The Academy, 29th 
June 1907. 



The 
Golden 



\^^HAT Ibsen Insists on Is that there 
Rule' Is no golden rule — that conduct 

must justify Itself by Its effect upon hap- 
piness and not by its conformity to any 
rule or ideal. And since happiness con- 
sists In the fulfilment of the will, which 
Is constantly growing, and cannot be ful- 
filled to-day under the conditions which 
secured Its fulfilment yesterday, he 
claims afresh the old Protestant right 
of private judgment In questions of con- 
duct as against all institutions, the so- 
called Protestant Churches themselves 
128 



included. Quintessence of Ibsenism, 
pp. 140, 141. 

TT is impossible to prove that the gov- The 

erning few have ever, in any gener- ciallS*"^ 
ally valid sense, been the ablest men of 
their time. James I. governed Shake- 
spear: was he an abler man? Louis 
XV. and his mistresses governed Tur- 
got : was it by their superiority in abil- 
ity or character? Socialism and Supe- 
rior Brains, p. 52. 

When power and riches are thrown hap- 
hazard into children's cradles as they 
are in England, you get a governing 
class without industry, character, cour- 
age, or real experience; and under such 
circumstances reforms are produced 
only by catastrophes followed by panics 
in which " something must be done." 
Thus it costs a cholera epidemic to 
achieve a Public Health Act, a Crimean 
War to reform the Civil Service, and a 
gunpowder plot to disestablish the Irish 
129 



Church. It was by the light, not of 
reason, but of the moon, that the need 
for paying serious attention to the Irish 
land question was seen in England. 
John Bull's Other Island, pp. xxv., xxvi. 

LORD SUMMERHAYS. Men are not gov- 
erned by justice, but by law or persua- 
sion. When they refuse to be governed 
by law or persuasion, they have to be 
governed by force or fraud, or both. I 
used both when law and persuasion 
failed me. Every ruler of men since 
the world began has done so, even when 
he has hated both fraud and force as 
heartily as I do. Misalliance (unpub- 
lished 19 1 2). 

We are all now under what Burke called 
" the hoofs of the swinish multitude." 
Burke's language gave great offence be- 
cause the implied exceptions to its uni- 
versal application made it a class insult; 
and it certainly was not for the pot to 
call the kettle black. The aristocracy 
he defended, in spite of the political 

130 



marriages by which it tried to secure 
breeding for itself, had its mind under- 
trained by silly schoolmasters and gov- 
ernesses, its character corrupted by 
gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adul- 
terated to complete spuriousness by 
flattery and flunkeyism. It is no better 
to-day and never will be any better: our 
very peasants have something morally 
hardier in them that culminates occa- 
sionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Car- 
lyle. But observe, this aristocracy, 
which was overpowered from 1832 to 
1885 by the middle class, has come back 
to power by the votes of " the swinish 
multitude." Tom Paine has triumphed 
over Edmund Burke; and the swine are 
now courted electors. How many of 
their own class have these electors sent 
to parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 
670, and these only under the persua- 
sion of conspicuous personal qualifica- 
tions and popular eloquence. The mul- 
titude thus pronounces judgment on its 
own units : it admits itself unfit to gov- 

131 



ern, and will vote only for a man mor- 
phologically and generically transfigured 
by palatial residence and equipage, by 
transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of 
aristocratic kinship. Well, we two 
know these transfigured persons, these 
college passmen, these well groomed 
monocular Algys and Bobbies, these 
cricketers to whom age brings golf in- 
stead of wisdom, these plutocratic prod- 
ucts of " the nail and sarspan business 
as he got his money by." Do they 
know whether to laugh or cry at the no- 
tion that they, poor devils ! will drive 
a team of continents as they drive a 
four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of 
casual trade and speculation into an or- 
dered productivity; and federate our 
colonies into a world-Power of the first 
magnitude? Give these people the 
most perfect political constitution and 
the soundest political program that 
benevolent omniscience can devise for 
them, and they will interpret it into 
mere fashionable folly or canting charity 

132 



as Infallibly as a savage converts the 
philosophical theology of a Scotch mis- 
sionary Into crude African Idolatry. 
Man and Superman, pp. xxIL, xxIII. 

A King Is an Idol: that Is why I am a 
Republican. The New Age, 2nd June 
1910. 

When an artificial aristocracy Is created 
by Idolization It will work with all the 
appearance of a natural and Inevitable 
system as long as the aristocrats not 
only wear their trappings and keep up 
the observances which set their dally 
lives and habits apart from those of or- 
dinary folk, but also do the work which 
the Idolization system was Invented to 
provide for, and without which It has no 
sense. But once let them evade the 
work whilst retaining the privileges, 
and they will become an Idle class, and, 
as such, an Inferior class; for no mortal 
power can maintain the idler at a higher 
level than the worker. The Idol who 

133 



does not earn his worship Is an Impostor 
and a robber; and it is found in practice 
that whereas an aristocracy which really 
governs can maintain its supremacy even 
when its members are in their personal 
conduct what we should call infernal 
scoundrels, aristocracies of the most 
charming ladies and gentlemen imagin- 
able who do not govern, finally collapse 
and are trampled out with every circum- 
stance of violence and insult by the mob. 
By the mob I mean the unldolized. 
The question for the political scientist, 
in other words for the Fabian, Is 
whether It Is possible to devise any sys- 
tem of constitutional checks or safe- 
guards by which the system of govern- 
ment by Idolized aristocracy can be 
secured against this danger. And when 
I say idolized aristocracy, I Include its 
latest form, which Is an Idolized bureau- 
cracy of experts. Socialism without 
experts Is as impossible as shipbuilding 
without experts or dentistry without ex- 
perts. In so far as we have already 

134 



done without experts, we have done 
without Socialism; and all the fears ex- 
pressed that Socialism will produce a 
huge increase of officialism are quite 
well grounded: under Socialism we shall 
all be officials, actually or potentially. 

Unpublished. 

The insensibility of the English govern- 
ing classes to philosophical, moral and 
social considerations — in short, to any 
considerations which require a little In- 
tellectual exertion and sympathetic alert- 
ness — is tempered, as we Irish well 
know, by an absurd susceptibility to in- 
timidation. John Bull's Other Island, 
p. XX vl. 

pLEOPATRA. When I was foolish, The ^ 
I did what I liked, except when Man4 
Ftatateeta beat me; and even then I ^""'^^'^ 
cheated her and did it by stealth. Now 
that Caesar has made me wise, It is no 
use my liking or disliking: I do what 
must be done, and have no time to at- 

135 



Happiness 



\ 



Heaven 



tend to myself. That Is not happiness; 
but It Is greatness. 

Casar and Cleopatra, p. 165. 

'VT'OU must never say that the knowl- 
edge of how to live without hap- 
piness is happiness. A teetotaller might 
as well preach that the knowledge of 
how to practise total abstinence Is the 
truest drunkenness. Happiness Is not 
the object of life: life has no object: It 
Is an end In Itself; and courage consists 
In the readiness to sacrifice happiness 
for an Intenser quality of life. Corre- 
spondence. 

l^EEGAN. In my dreams heaven Is 
a country where the State is the 
Church and the Church the people : three 
In one and one In three. It is a com- 
monwealth In which work Is play and 
play Is life: three In one and one In 
three. It Is a temple in which the priest 
is the worshipper and worshipper the 
worshipped: three in one and one in 
136 



three. It Is a godhead In which all life 
is human and all humanity divine : three 
in one and one in three. John Bull's 
Other Island, p. 125. 

DON JUAN. In Heaven, as I picture it, 
dear lady, you live and work instead of 
playing and pretending. You face 
things as they are; you escape nothing 
but glamor; and your steadfastness and 
your peril are your glory. Man and 
Superman, p. 104. 

DON JUAN. Do you suppose heaven is 
like earth, where people persuade them- 
selves that what is done can be undone 
by repentance; that what is spoken can 
be unspoken by withdrawing it; that 
what is true can be annihilated by a 
general agreement to give it the lie? 
No: Heaven is the home of the masters 
of reality. Man and Superman, p. 103. 



'HE DEVIL. The gulf between Heaven 



Heaven and Hell is the difference 
betweer the angelic and the diabolic 

137 



and Hell 



temperament. What more impassable 
gulf could you have? Think of what 
you have seen on earth. There Is no 
physical gulf between the philosopher's 
class room and the bull ring; but the 
bull fighters do not come to the class 
room for all that. Have you ever been 
In the country where I have the largest 
following — England? There they have 
great race-courses, and also concert 
rooms where they play the classical com- 
positions of his Excellency's friend Mo- 
zart. Those who go to the race-courses 
can stay away from them and go to the 
classical concerts Instead If they like: 
there Is no law against It; for English- 
men never will be slaves : they are free 
to do whatever the Government and 
public opinion allow them to do. And 
the classical concert Is admitted to be 
a higher, more cultivated, poetic. Intel- 
lectual, ennobling place than the race- 
course. But do the lovers of racing de- 
sert their sport and flock to the concert 
room? Not they. They would suffer 
138 



there all the weariness the Commander 
has suffered In Heaven. There Is the 
great gulf of the parable between the two 
places. A mere physical gulf they could 
bridge; or at least I could bridge It for 
them (the earth Is full of Devil's 
Bridges) ; but the gulf of dislike Is Im- 
passable and eternal. Man and Super- 
man, pp. lOI, I02. 

DON JUAN. Senor Commander: you 
know the way to the frontier of hell 
and heaven. Be good enough to direct 
me. 

THE STATUE. Oh, the frontier Is only 
the difference between two ways of look- 
ing at things. Any road will take you 
across It If you really want to get there. 
Man and Superman, p. 135. 

rj"ELL Is the home of honor, duty, Heii 

justice, and the rest of the seven 
deadly virtues. All the wickedness on 
earth Is done In their name: where else 
but In hell should they have their re- 

139 



ward? Have I not told you that the 
truely damned are those who are happy 
in hell? Man and Superman, p. 91. 

Hell is paved with good intentions, not 
with bad ones. Man and Superman, p. 

239- 

KEEGAN. This world, sir, is very clear- 
ly a place of torment and penance, a 
place where the fool flourishes and the 
good and wise are hated and persecuted, 
a place where men and women torture 
one another in the name of love; where 
children are scourged and enslaved in 
the name of parental duty and educa- 
tion; where the weak in body are poi- 
soned and mutilated in the name of heal- 
ing, and the weak In character are put 
to the horrible torture of imprisonment, 
not for hours but for years, in the name 
of justice. It is a place where the hard- 
est toil is a welcome refuge from the 
horror and tedium of pleasure, and 
where charity and good works are done 
only for hire to ransom the souls of the 
140 



spoiler and the sybarite. Now, sir, 
there Is only one place of horror and 
torment known to my religion ; and that 
place is hell. Therefore it is plain to 
me that this earth of ours must be hell, 
and that we are all here to expiate 
crimes committed by us In a former 
existence. 

John Bull's Other Island, p. 97. 

THE English are extremely particu- The 
, . °, . 1-1 11-1^ Hereditary 

lar m selectmg their butlers, whilst principle 

they do not select their barons at all, / 

taking them as the accident of birth v 

sends them. The consequences include 

much Ironic comedy. The Irrational 

Knot, p. xIII. 

- i - i - 

'T'HERE are two sorts of family life, The Home 

•^ Phil ; and your experience of human 

nature only extends, so far, to one of 

them. The sort you know Is based on 

mutual respect, on recognition of the 

right of every member of the household 

to Independence and privacy in their 

141 



personal concerns. And because you 
have always enjoyed that, It seems such 
a matter of course to you that you don't 
value It. But there Is another sort of 
family life; a life In which husbands 
open their wives' letters and call on 
them to account for every farthing of 
their expenditure and every moment of 
their time; In which women do the same 
to their children; In which no room Is 
private and no hour sacred; In which 
duty, obedience, affection, home, moral- 
ity and religion are detestable tyrannies, 
and life Is a vulgar round of punish- 
ments and lies, coercion and rebellion, 
jealousy, suspicion, recrimination. You 
Never Can Tell, pp. 234, 235. 



gome "pVEN If Home Rule were as un- 
healthy as an Englishman's eatlnpj, 
as Intemperate as his drinking, as filthy 
as his smoking, as licentious as his do- 
mesticity, as corrupt as his elections, as 
murderously greedy as his commerce, 
as cruel as his prisons, and as merciless 
142 



as his streets, Ireland's claim to self- 
government would still be as good as 
England's. John Bull's Other Island, 

p. XXXV III. 

IITOSPITALS are not public luxuries, Hospitals 

but public necessities : when the 
private contributor buttons up his 
pocket — as he Invariably now does If he 
understands what he is about — the re- 
sult Is not that the sick poor are left to 
perish in their slums, but that a hospital 
rate is struck, and the hospitals happi- 
ly rescued from the abuses of practi- 
cally Irresponsible private management 
(which the rich writers of conscience- 
money cheques never dream of attempt- 
ing to control), with income uncertain; 
authority scrambled for by committee, 
doctors, chiefs of the nursing staff, and 
permanent officials; and the angel-eyed 
nurses, coarsely and carelessly fed, 
sweated and overworked beyond all en- 
durance except by women to whom the 
opportunity of pursuing a universally 

143 



respected occupation with a considerable 
chance of finally marrying a doctor is 
worth seizing at any cost. For this 
the overthrow of the begging, cadging, 
advertising, voluntary-contribution sys- 
tem means the substitution of the cer- 
tain income, the vigilant audit, the ex- 
pert official management, the standard 
wages and hours of work, the sensitive- 
ness to public opinion (including that 
of the class to which the patients be- 
long), the subjection to fierce criticism 
by party newspapers keen for scandals 
to be used as local electioneering capi- 
tal, all of which have been called into 
action by the immense development in 
local government under the Acts of the 
last ten years. Of course, as long as 
Ignorant philanthropists, and people 
anxious to buy positions as public bene- 
factors, maintain private hospitals by 
private subscription, the ratepayers and 
the local authorities will be only too 
glad to shirk their burdens and duties, 
just as they would if they could induce 

144 



philanthropists to light and pave the 
streets for them; but when the philan- 
thropists learn that the only practical 
effect of their misplaced bounty on the 
poor Is that the patient gets less accom- 
modation and consideration, and the 
nurse less pay and no security In return 
for longer hours of labor, they will be- 
gin to understand how all the old objec- 
tions to pauperizing individuals apply 
with tenfold force to pauperizing the 
public. The Saturday Review, 19th 
December 1896. 

"VT^ETthls hand, 

That many a two days bruise hath 
ruthless given. 

Hath kept no dungeon locked for twen- 
ty years. 

Hath slain no sentient creature for my 
sport. 

I am too squeamish for your dainty 
world, 

That cowers behind the gallows and the 
lash, 

145 



A Human- 
itarian 



The world that robs the poor and with 
their spoil 

Does what its tradesmen tell It. Oh, 
your ladles ! 

Sealskinned and egret-feathered; all de- 
fiance 

To Nature; cowering If one say to them 

" What will the servants think? " Your 
gentlemen ! 

Your tailor-tyrannized visitors of whom 

Flutter of wing and singing In the wood 

Make chickenbutchers. And your medi- 
cine men ! 

Groping for cures In the tormented en- 
trails 

Of friendly dogs. 

The Admirable Bashville, p. 31. 



Human \^7E must finally adapt our instltu- 

Nattxre and y y . , •' ^ -, , 

Institutions tions to human nature. In the 

long run our present plan of trying to 

force human nature Into a mould of 

existing abuses, superstitions, and cor- 

146 



rupt interests, produces the explosive 
forces that wreck civilization. 

Getting Married, p. 204. 



TBSEN never presents his play to you ibsen 

as a romance for your entertainment : 
he says, In effect, " Here is yourself and 
myself, our society, our civilization. 
The evil and good, the horror and the 
hope of It, are woven out of your life 
and mine." The Saturday Review, 
27th April 1895. 

If Ibsen were to visit London, and ex- 
press his opinion of our English theatre 
— as Wagner expressed his opinion of 
the Philharmonic Society, for example 
— our actors and managers would go 
down to posterity as exactly such per- 
sons as Ibsen described them. He is 
master of the situation, this man of 
genius; and when we complain that he 
does not share our trumpery little no- 
tions of life and society; that the themes 

147 



that make us whine and wince have no 
terrors for him, but infinite interest; and 
that he is far above the barmaid's and 
shop superintendent's obligation to be 
agreeable to Tom, Dick and Harry 
(which naturally convinces Tom, Dick 
and Harry that he is no gentleman), 
we are not making out a case against 
him, but simply stating the grounds of 
his eminence. When any person objects 
to an Ibsen play because it does not 
hold the mirror up to his own mind, I 
can only remind him that a horse might 
make exactly the same objection. For 
my own part, I do not endorse all Ib- 
sen's views : I even prefer my own plays 
to his in some respects; but I hope I 
know a great man from a little one as 
far as my comprehension of such things 
goes. Criticism may be pardoned for 
every, mistake except that of not know- 
ing a man of rank in literature when it 
meets one. The Saturday Review, 30th 
January 1897. 



148 



\X7'HEN an American journalist de- 
scribes Sir Edward Burne-Jones 
as " The English Gustave Dore," or 
declares Madox Brown to have been 
" as a realist, second only to Frith," he 
means well; and possibly the victims of 
his good intentions give him credit for 
them. But I do most earnestly beg the 
inhabitants of this island to be extreme- 
ly careful how they compare any for- 
eigner to Shakespear. The foreigner 
can know nothing of Shakspear's power 
over language. He can only judge 
him by his intellectual force and dra- 
matic insight, quite apart from his 
beauty of expression. From such a 
test Ibsen comes out with a double first 
class: Shakespear comes out hardly any- 
where. Our English deficiency in ana- 
lytic power makes it extremely hard for 
us to understand how a man who is 
great in any respect can be insignificant 
in any other respect; and perhaps the 
average foreigner is not much cleverer. 
But when the foreigner has the particu- 
149 



lar respect In which our man is great 
cut off from him artificially by the 
change of language, as a screen of col- 
oured glass will shut off certain rays 
from a camera, then the deficiency which 
is concealed even from our experts by 
the splendour of Shakespear's literary 
gift, may be obvious to quite common- 
place people who know him only 
through translations. In any language 
of the world Brand, Peer Gynt, and 
Emperor or Galilean prove their author 
a thinker of extraordinary penetration, 
and a moralist of international influence. 
Turn from them to To be or not to be, 
or The seven ages of man, and imagine, 
if you can, anybody more critical than 
a village schoolmaster being imposed on 
by such platitudinous fudge. The com- 
parison does not honor Ibsen: it makes 
Shakespear ridiculous; and for both 
their sakes it should not be drawn. If 
we cannot for once leave the poor Bard 
alone, let us humbly apologize to Ibsen 
for our foolish worship of a foolish col- 

150 



lection of shallow proverbs in blank 
verse. Let us plead that if we compare, 
not the absolute Shakespear with the 
absolute Ibsen, but the advance from 
the old stage zany Hamblet to our 
William's Hamlet with the advance 
from Faust to Peer Gynt, Ham- 
let was really a great achievement, 
and might stand as an isolated feat 
against Peer Gynt as an isolated feat. 
But as it led to nothing, whereas Peer 
Gynt led to so much that it now ranks 
only as part of Ibsen's romantic wild 
oats — above all, as Ibsen's message 
nerved him to fight all Europe in the 
teeth of starvation, whereas Shake- 
spear's was not proof even against the 
ignorance and vulgarity of the London 
playgoer, it only needs another turn of 
the discussion to shew that a comparison 
of the two popular masterpieces is like 
a comparison of the Eiffel Tower to 
one of the peaks in an Alpine chain. 
The Saturday Review, 26th March 
1898. 

151 



The Idea QON JUAN. ThIs creaturc Man, 
^"^ who in his own selfish affairs is a 
coward to the backbone, will fight for 
an idea like a hero. He may be abject 
as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a 
fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst 
he is spiritually weak enough to listen to 
reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you 
can shew a man a piece of what he now 
calls God's work to do, and what he 
will later on call by many new names, 
you can make him entirely reckless of 
the consequences to himself personally. 
Man and Superman, p. 1 1 1. 

DON JUAN. Every idea for which Man 
will die will be a Catholic idea. When 
the Spaniard learns at last that he is no 
better than the Saracen, and his prophet 
no better than Mahomet, he will arise, 
more Catholic than ever, and die on a 
barricade across the filthy slum he 
starves in, for universal liberty and 
equality. 

THE STATUE. Bosh ! 

152 



DON JUAN. What you call bosh Is the 
only thing men dare die for. Later on, 
Liberty will not be Catholic enough: 
men will die for human perfection, to 
which they will sacrifice all their liberty 
gladly. 

THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at 
a loss for an excuse for killing one an- 
other. 

DON JUAN. What of that! It is not 

death that matters, but the fear of 

j death. It Is not killing and dying that 

degrades us, but base living, and accept- 

j Ing the wages and profits of degrada- 

! tion. Man and Superman, p. iio. 

j A S Man grows through the ages, he weais 
j '^ finds himself bolder by the growth 
f of his spirit (if I may so name the un- 
known) and dares more and more to 
love and trust Instead,^ of to fear and 
fight. But his courage has other ef- 
fects: he also raises himself from mere 
consciousness to knowledge by daring 

153 



more and more to face facts and tell 
himself the truth. For in his infancy 
of helplessness and terror he could not 
face the inexorable; and facts being of 
all things the most inexorable, he masked 
all the threatening ones as fast as he 
discovered them; so that now every 
mask requires a hero to tear it off. The 
King of terrors, Death, was the Arch- 
Inexorable: Man could not bear the 
dread of that thought. He must per- 
suade himself that Death could be pro- 
pitiated, circumvented, abolished. How 
he fixed the mask of immortality on the 
face of Death for this purpose we all 
know. And he did the like with all dis- 
agreeables as long as they remained 
inevitable. Otherwise he must have 
gone mad with terror of the grim shapes 
around him, headed by the skeleton with 
the scythe and hourglass. The masks 
were his ideals, as he called them; and 
what, he would ask, would life be with- 
out ideals? Thus he became an ideal- 
ist, and remained so until he dared to 

154 



begin pulling the masks off and looking 
the spectres In the face — dared, that is, 
to be more and more a realist. But all 
men are not equally brave; and the 
greatest terror prevailed whenever some 
realist bolder than the rest laid hands 
on a mask which they did not yet dare 
to do without. 

We have plenty of these masks round 
us still — some of them more fantastic 
than any of the Sandwich Islanders* 
masks in the British Museum. In our 
novels and romances especially we see 
the most beautiful of all the masks — 
those devised to disguise the brutalities 
of the sexual instinct In the earlier stages 
of Its development, and to soften the 
rigorous aspect of the iron laws by 
which Society regulates its gratification. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 20, 21. 



TDEALISM, which is only a flatter- weausm 

Ing name for romance In politics and 
morals, Is as obnoxious to me as ro- 



mance in ethics or religion. Plays: 
Pleasant and Unpleasant. Vol. 11. 
Pleasant, p. xvlli. 

The realist at last loses patience with 
Ideals altogether, and sees In them only 
something to blind us, something to 
numb us, something whereby, Instead of 
resisting death, we can disarm It by 
committing suicide. The Idealist, who 
has taken refuge with the Ideals because 
he hates himself and is ashamed of 
himself, thinks that all this is so much 
the better. The realist, who has come 
to have a deep respect for himself and 
faith in the validity of his own will, 
thinks it so much the worse. To the 
one, human nature, naturally corrupt. Is 
only held back from the excesses of the 
last years of the Roman Empire by self- 
denying conformity to the Ideals. To 
the other, these Ideals are only swad- 
dling clothes which man has outgrown, 
and which Insufferably Impede his move- 
ments. No wonder the two cannot 
156 



agree. The idealist says, " Realism 
means egotism; and egotism means de- 
pravity." The realist declares that 
when a man abnegates the will to live 
and be free in a world of the living and 
free, seeking only to conform to ideals 
for the sake of being, not himself, but 
" a good man," then he is morally dead 
and rotten, and must be left unheeded 
to abide his resurrection, if that by good 
luck arrive before his bodily death. 
Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 30, 31. 

Since it is on the weaknesses of the 
higher types of character that idealism 
seizes, Ibsen's examples of vanity, sel- 
fishness, folly and failure are not vulgar 
villains, but men who in an ordinary 
novel or melodrama would be heroes. 
His most tragic point is reached in the 
destinies of Brand and Rosmer, who 
drive those whom they love to death in 
its most wanton and cruel form. The 
ordinary Philistine commits no such 
atrocities: he marries the woman he 

^S7 



likes, and lives more or less happily 
ever after; but that is not because he is 
greater than Brand or Rosmer, but be- 
cause he is less. The idealist is a more 
dangerous animal than the Philistine 
just as a man is a more dangerous ani- 
mal than a sheep. Though Brand vir- 
tually murdered his wife, I can under- 
stand many a woman, comfortably 
married to an amiable Philistine, read- 
ing the play and envying the victim her 
husband. For when Brand's wife, hav- 
ing made the sacrifice he has exacted, 
tells him that he was right; that she is 
happy now; that she sees God face to 
face — but reminds him that " whoso 
sees Jehovah dies," he instinctively 
clasps his hands over her eyes; and that 
action raises him at once far above the 
criticism that sneers at idealism from 
beneath, instead of surveying it from the 
clear ether above, which can only be 
reached through its mists. Quintessence 
of Ibsenism, pp. 130, 131. 



158 



r^ ENERATIONS of shallow critics, xhe^.^^ ^^ 
^^ mostly amateurs, have laughed at thrsSge 
Partridge for admiring the King In 
Hamlet more than Hamlet himself 
(with Garrick In the part), because 
'' any one could see that the King was 
an actor." But surely Partridge was 
right. He went to the theatre to see, 
not a real limited monarch, but a stage 
king, speaking as Partridges like to 
hear a king speaking, and able to have 
people's heads cut off, or to brow-beat 
treason from behind an Invisible hedge 
of majestically asserted divinity. Field- 
ing misunderstood the matter because In 
a world of Fieldlngs there would be 
neither kings nor Partridges. It Is all 
very well for Hamlet to declare that the 
business of the theatre Is to hold the 
mirror up to nature. He Is allowed 
to do it out of respect for the bard, just 
as he Is allowed to say to a minor actor, 
" Do not saw the air thus," though he 
has himself been sawing the air all the 
evening, and the unfortunate minor ac- 

IS9 



tor has hardly had the chance of cutting 
a chip off with a penknife. But every- 
body knows perfectly well that the func- 
tion of the theatre is to realize for the 
spectators certain pictures which their 
imagination craves for, the said pictures 
being fantastic as the dreams of Alnas- 
char. Nature is only brought in as an 
accomplice in the illusion: for example, 
the actress puts rouge on her cheek in- 
stead of burnt cork because it looks 
more natural; but the moment the illu- 
sion is sacrificed to nature, the house is 
up in arms and the play is chivied from 
the stage. I began my own dramatic 
career by writing plays in which I faith- 
fully held the mirror up to nature. 
They are much admired in private read- 
ing by social reformers, industrial in- 
vestigators, and revolted daughters; but 
on one of them being rashly exhibited 
behind the footlights, it was received 
with a paroxysm of execration, whilst 
the mere perusal of the others induces 
loathing in every person, including my- 
i6o 



self, in whom the theatrical Instinct flour- 
ishes In Its Integrity. Shakespear 
made exactly one attempt, In Troilus and 
Cresslda, to hold the mirror up to na- 
ture ; and he probably nearly ruined him- 
self by It. The Saturday Review, 7th 
November 1896. 

\X7'HAT Is all this growing love of ImperiaUsm 

pageantry, this effusive loyalty, 
this officious rising and uncovering at 
a wav^e from a flag or a blast 
from a brass band? Imperialism? 
Not a bit of It. Obsequiousness, 
servility, cupidity roused by the pre- 
vailing smell of money. When Mr. 
Carnegie rattled his millions In his 
pockets all England became one rapa- 
cious cringe. Only, when Rhodes (who 
had probably been reading my Socialism 
for Millionaires) left word that no Idler 
was to Inherit his estate, the bent backs 
straightened mistrustfully for a mo- 
ment. Could It be that the Diamond 
King was no gentleman after all? 
161 



i 



However, It was easy to Ignore a rich 
man's solecism. The ungentlemanly 
clause was not mentioned again; and 
the backs soon bowed themselves back 
Into their natural shape. Man and 
Superman, p. xxv. 

Now for England's share of warning. 
Let her look to her Empire; for unless 
she makes It such a Federation for civil 
strength and defence that all free peo- 
ples will cling to It voluntarily, It will 
Inevitably become a military tyranny to 
prevent them from abandoning It; and 
such a tyranny will drain the English 
taxpayer of his money more effectually 
than Its worst cruelties can ever drain 
Its victims of their liberty. A political 
scheme that cannot be carried out except 
by soldiers will not be a permanent one. 
John Bull's Other Island, p. xl. 



iaut^'^" npHE moral evolution of the social 
Individual Is from submission and 
obedience as economizers of effort and 
162 



responsibility, and safeguards against 
panic and incontinence, to wilfulness 
and self-assertion made safe by reason 
and self-control, just as plainly as his 
physical growth leads from the peram- 
bulator and the nurse's apron-string to 
the power of walking alone, and from 
the tutelage of the boy to the responsi- 
bility of the man. The Sanity of Art, 

P- S?>' 

If you study the electric light you will 
find that your house contains a great 
quantity of highly susceptible copper 
wire which gorges itself with electricity 
and gives you no light whatever. But 
here and there occurs a scrap of intense- 
ly insusceptible, intensely resistant ma- 
terial; and that stubborn scrap grapples 
with the current and will not let it 
through until it has made itself useful 
to you as those two vital qualities of 
literature, light and heat. Now if I 
am to be no mere copper wire amateur 
but a luminous author, I must also be a 
163 



most Intensely refractory person, liable 
to go out and to go wrong at inconven- 
ient moments, and with incendiary possi- 
bilities. Man and Superman, p. xxxvi. 

of^Pur*^se TTEW of US Havc vitality enough to 
''■ make any of our instincts imperi- 
ous: we can be made to live on pre- 
tences, as the masterful minority well 
know. 

Three Plays for Puritans, p. xvi. 

ANN. But, Jack, you cannot get through 
life without considering other people a 
little. 

TANNER. Ay; but what other people? 
It is this consideration of other people 
— or rather this cowardly fear of them 
which we call consideration — that makes : 
us the sentimental slaves as we are. To, 
consider you, as you call it, is to substi-^ 
tute your will for my own. How if 
it be a baser will than mine? Are wom- j 
en taught better than men or worse?; 
Are mobs of voters taught better than j 
164 ■ 



statesmen or worse? Worse, of course, 
In both cases. And then what sort of 
world are you going to get, with its pub- 
lic men considering its voting mobs, and 
Its private men considering their wives? 
Man and Superman^ P- S^- 



TT seems to me that the natural atti- The 

tude for a husband whose wife pre- nSl^d 
fers another man is a purely apologetic 
one; though I observe that on the stage 
he seems to take It for granted that he 
Is an Injured person as well as an unfor- 
tunate one. No doubt my moral sense J 
has not been properly trained on such 
points; so possibly I shall alter my opin- 
ion when I get married, though I confess 
I regard that as an additional reason 
for not getting married. The Saturday 
Review, 30th November 1895. 



When King Arthur left Guinevere grov- 
elling on the floor with her head within 
an inch of his toes, and stood plainly 

165 



J 



conveying to the numerous bystanders 
that this was the proper position for a 
female who had forgotten herself so far 
as to prefer another man to him, one's 
gorge rose at the Tappertitian vulgarity 
and infamy of the thing; and it was a 
relief when the scene ended with a fine 
old Richard the Third effect of Arthur 
leading his mail-clad knights off to bat- 
tle. That vision of a fine figure of a 
woman, torn with sobs and remorse, 
stretched at the feet of a nobly superior 
and deeply wronged lord of creation, is 
no doubt still as popular with the men 
whose sentimental vanity it flatters as it 
was in the days of the Idylls of the 
King. But since then we have been 
learning that a woman is something 
more than a piece of sweetstuff to fat- 
ten a man's emotions; and our amateur 
King Arthurs are beginning to realize, 
with shocked surprise, that the more gen- 
erous the race grows the stronger be- 
comes its disposition to bring them to 
their senses with a stinging dose of 

i66 



wholesome ridicule. The Saturday Re- 
view, 19th January 1895. 

t-IIS will, in setting his imagination to inspiration 

work, had produced a great puzzle 
for his intellect. In no case does the 
difference between the will and the intel- 
lect come out more clearly than In that 
of the poet, save only that of the lover. 
... It is only the naif who goes to the 
creative artist with absolute confidence 
in receiving an answer to his " What 
does this passage mean? " That Is the 
very question which the poet's own Intel- 
lect, which had no part In the conception 
of the poem, may be asking him. And 
this curiosity of the Intellect — this rest- 
less life In it which differentiates It from 
dead machinery, and which troubles our 
lesser artists but little. Is one of the 
marks of the greater sort. 
Quintessence of Ibsenisni, pp. 59, 60. 

— }-H — 

THE promotion of immoralities Into The 
I'.' • i. -1 • Instability 

moralities is constantly going on. of Morals 

167 



Christianity and Mohammedanism, once 
thought ojf and dealt with exactly as 
Anarchism Is thought of and dealt with 
to-day, have become established relig- 
ions; and fresh Immoralities are perse- 
cuted In their name. The truth Is that 
the vast majority of persons professing 
these religions have never been anything 
but simple moralists. The respectable 
Englishman who Is a Christian because 
he was born In Clapham would be a 
Mahometan for the cognate reason If he 
had been born In Constantinople. He 
has never willingly tolerated Immorality. 
He did not adopt any Innovation until 
It had become moral ; and then he adopt- 
ed It, not on Its merits, but solely be- 
cause It had become moral. In doing so 
he never realized that It had ever been 
Immoral; consequently Its early strug- 
gles taught him no lesson; and he has 
opposed the next step In human progress 
as Indignantly as If neither manners, cus- 
toms, nor thought had ever changed 
since the beginning of the world. Tol- 
i68 



eratlon must be imposed on him as a 
mystic and painful duty by his spiritual 
and political leaders, or he will condemn 
the world to stagnation, w^hlch Is the 
penalty of an Inflexible morality. The 
Shewmg-iip of Blanco Posnet, pp. 348, 
349- 



T DO not see moral chaos and anarchy our 

as the alternative to romantic con- ^°^***^^°°^ 
ventlon; and I am not going to pretend 
I do merely to please the people who are 
convinced that the world Is only held 
together by the force of unanimous, 
strenuous, eloquent, trumpet-tongued ly- 
ing. To me the tragedy and comedy of 
life He In the consequences, sometimes 
terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our per- 
sistent attempts to found our Institutions 
on the ideals suggested to our Imagina- 
tions by our half-satisfied passions, in- 
stead of on a genuinely scientific natu- 
ral history. Plays: Pleasant and Un- 
pleasant. Vol. II. Pleasant, p. xvili. 

169 



One of the evils of the pretence that our 
Institutions represent abstract principles 
of justice instead of being mere social 
scaffolding is that persons of a certain 
temperament take the pretence seriously, 
and, when the law is on the side of In- 
justice, will not accept the situation, and 
are driven mad by their vain struggle 
against It. Dickens has drawn the type 
In his Man from Shropshire In Bleak 
House. Most public men and all law- 
yers have been appealed to by victims of 
this sense of injustice — the most unhelp- 
able of afflictions In a society like ours. 
Three Plays for Puritans, pp. 297, 298. 

to dI^?^ nrO say that fashions change more rap- 
^ idly than men is a very crude state- 
ment of extremes. Everything has its 
own rate of change. Fashions change 
more quickly than manners, manners 
more quickly than morals, morals more 
quickly than passions, and, in general, 
the conscious, reasonable, intellectual life 
more quickly than the instinctive, wilful, 
170 



affectionate one. The dramatist who 
deals with the Irony and humour of the 
relatively durable sides of life, or with 
their pity and terror, Is the one whose 
comedies and tragedies will last longest 
— sometimes so long as to lead a book- 
struck generation to dub him " Immor- 
tal," and proclaim him as " not for an 
age, but for all time." Fashionable 
dramatists begin to " date," as the crit- 
ics call It, In a few years : the accusation 
Is rife at present against the earlier plays 
of PInero and Grundy, though It Is due 
to these gentlemen to observe that Shake- 
spear's plays must have " dated " far 
more when they were from twenty to 
a hundred years old than they have done 
since the world gave up expecting them 
to mirror the passing hour. When Caste 
and Diplomacy were fresh, London As- 
surance had begun to date most horri- 
bly: nowadays Caste and Diplomacy 
date like the day before yesterday's 
tinned salmon; whereas If London As- 
surance were revived (and I beg that 
171 



nothing of the kind be attempted) , there 
would be no more question of dating 
about it than about the plays of Gar- 
rick or Tobin or Mrs. Centlivre. 
But now observe the consequences, as 
to this dating business, of the fact that 
morals change more slowly than cos- 
tumes and manners, and instincts and 
passions than morals. It follows, does 
it not, that every " immortal " play will 
run the following course. First, like 
London Assurance its manners and fash- 
ions will begin to date. If its matter is 
deep enough to tide it over this danger, 
it will come into repute again, like the 
comedies of Sheridan or Goldsmith, as 
a modern classic. But after some time 
— some centuries, perhaps — it will begin 
to date again in point of its ethical con- 
ception. Yet if it deals so powerfully 
with the instincts and passions of hu- 
manity as to survive this also, it will 
again regain its place, this time as an an- 
tique classic, especially if it tells a capital 
story. It is impossible now to read, with- 1 
172 



out a curdling of the blood and a bris- 
tling of the hair, the frightful but dra- 
matically most powerful speech which 
David, on his deathbed, delivers to his 
son about the old enemy whom he had 
himself sworn to spare. " Thou art a 
wise man and knowest what thou ought- 
est to do unto him; but his hoar head 
bring thou down to the grave with 
blood." Odysseus, proud of outwitting 
all men at cheating and lying, and in- 
tensely relishing the blood of Penelope's 
suitors, is equally outside our morality. 
So is Punch. But David and Ulysses, 
like Punch and Judy, will survive for 
many a long day yet. Not until the 
change has reached our instincts and 
passions will their stories begin to 
" date " again for the last time before 
their final obsolescence. 
The Saturday Review, 27th June 1896. 

' I 'HERE is no reason why life as we Mr. Henry 

find it in Mr. James's novels — life, no^Iis^ 
that is, in which passion is subordinate 

173 



to intellect and to fastidious artistic taste 
— should not be represented on the stage. 
If It is real to Mr. James, it must be 
real to others; and why should not these 
others have their drama instead of being 
banished from the theatre (to the thea- 
tre's great loss) by the monotony and 
vulgarity of drama in which passion Is 
everything, intellect nothing, and art 
only brought In by the incidental out- 
rages upon it. As It happens, I am not 
myself In Mr. James's camp; In all the 
life that has energy enough to be Inter- 
esting to me, subjective volition, passion, 
will, make Intellect the merest tool. But 
there Is In the centre of that cyclone a 
certain calm spot where cultivated ladles 
and gentlemen live on independent In- 
comes or by pleasant artistic occupa- 
tions. It Is there that Mr. James's art 
touches life, selecting whatever Is grace- 
ful, exquisite, or dignified In Its serenity. 
It Is not life as Imagined by the pit or 
gallery, or even by the stalls: It is, let 
us say, the ideal of the balcony; but 

174 



that Is no reason why the pit and gallery 
should excommunicate It on the ground 
that It has no blood and entrails In It, 
and have Its sentence formulated for It 
by the fiercely ambitious and wilful pro- 
fessional man In the stalls. The whole 
case against Its adequacy really rests on 
its violation of the cardinal stage con- 
vention that love Is the most Irresistible 
of all the passions. Since most people 
go to the theatre to escape from reality, 
this convention is naturally dear to a 
world in which love, all powerful in the 
secret, unreal, day-dreaming life of the 
imagination, is in the real active life the 
abject slave of every trifling habit, preju- 
dice, and cowardice, easily stifled by 
shyness, class feeling, and pecuniary pru- 
dence, or diverted from what is theatri- 
cally assumed to be Its hurricane course 
by such obstacles as a thick ankle, a 
cockney accent, or an unfashionable hat. 
The Saturday Review, I2th January 
1895. 



175 



Shakespear 



Bunyanand W^^^ ."^ ^^^ ^ ^^^^^ VCrsion of The 

wiiHam^^^ ' ^ Pilgrim's Progress announced for 
production, I shook my head, knowing 
that Bunyan is far too great a dramatist 
for our theatre, which has never been 
resolute enough even in Its lewdness and 
venality to win the respect and interest 
which positive, powerful wickedness al- 
ways engages, much less the services of 
men of heroic conviction. Its greatest 
catch, Shakespear, wrote for the theatre 
because, with extraordinary artistic pow- 
ers, he understood nothing and believed 
nothing. Thirty-six big plays in five 
blank verse acts and (as Ruskin, I think, 
once pointed out) not a single hero! 
Only one man in them all who believes 
in life, enjoys life, thinks life worth liv- 
ing, and has a sincere, unrhetorical tear 
dropped over his deathbed; and that 
man — Falstaff ! What a crew they are 
— these Saturday to Monday athletic 
stockbroker Orlandos, these villains, 
fools, clowns, drunkards, cowards, in- 
triguers, fighters, lovers, patriots, hypo- 
176 



chondriacs who mistake themselves (and 
are mistaken by the author) for philoso- 
phers, princes without any sense of pub- 
lic duty, futile pessimists who imagine 
they are confronting a barren and un- 
meaning world when they are only con- 
templating their own worthlessness, self- 
seekers of all kinds, keenly observed and 
masterfully drawn from the romantic- 
commercial point of view. Once or 
twice we scent among them an antici- 
pation of the crudest side of Ibsen's 
polemics on the Woman Question, as in 
All's Well that Ends Well, where the 
man cuts as meanly selfish a figure be- 
side his enlightened lady doctor wife as 
Helmer beside Nora; or in Cymbeline, 
where Posthumus, having, as he be- 
lieves, killed his wife for inconstancy, 
speculates for a moment on what his 
life would have been worth if the same 
standard of continence had been applied 
to himself. And certainly no modern 
study of the voluptuous temperament, 
and the spurious heroism and heroinism 

177 



which its ecstasies produce, can add 
much to Antony and Cleopatra, unless 
it were some sense of the spuriousness 
on the author's part. But search for 
statesmanship, or even citizenship, or 
any sense of the commonwealth, material 
or spiritual, and you will not find the 
making of a decent vestryman or curate 
in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, 
courage, conviction, or any of the true 
heroic qualities, you find nothing but 
death made sensational, despair made 
stage sublime, sex made romantic, and 
barrenness covered up by sentimentality 
and the mechanical lilt of blank verse. 
All that you miss in Shakespear you find 
in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came 
quite obviously and naturally. The 
world was to him a more terrible place 
than it was to Shakespear; but he saw 
through it a path at the end of which 
a man might look not only forward to 
the Celestial City, but back on his life 
and say: — " Tho' with great difficulty 
178 



I am got hither, yet now I do not re- 
pent me of all the trouble I have been 
at to arrive where I am. My sword I 
give to him that shall succeed me In 
my pilgrimage, and my courage and 
skill to him that can get It." The heart 
vibrates like a bell to such an utterance 
as this: to turn from It to " Out, out, 
brief candle," and " The rest Is silence," 
and " We are such stuff as dreams are 
made of; and our little life Is rounded 
by a sleep " Is to turn from life, 
strength, resolution, morning air and 
eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunk- 
en nightmare. 

Let us descend now to the lower ground 
where Shakespear Is not disabled by his 
Inferiority In energy and elevation of 
spirit. Take one of his big fighting 
scenes, and compare Its blank verse, in 
point of mere rhetorical strenuousness, 
with Bunyan's prose. Macbeth's fa- 
mous cue for the fight with Macduff 
runs thus: — 

179 



Yet I will try the last: before my body 
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, 

Macduff, 
And damned be him that first cries, 

Hold, enough! 

Turn from this jingle, dramatically right 
in feeling, but silly and resourceless in 
thought and expression, to Apollyon's 
cue for the fight in the Valley of Humili- 
ation : " I am void of fear in this matter. 
Prepare thyself to die; for I swear by 
my infernal den that thou shalt go no 
farther : here will I spill thy soul." This 
is the same thing done masterly. Apart 
from Its superior grandeur, force, and 
appropriateness, it is better claptrap and 
Infinitely better word music. 
Shakespear, fond as he is of describ- 
ing fights, has hardly ever sufliclent 
energy or reality of imagination to finish 
without betraying the paper origin of 
his fancies by dragging In something 
classical in the style of the Cyclops' ham- 
mer falling " on Mars's armor, forged 
i8o 



for proof eterne." Hear how Bunyan 
does it: "I fought till my sword did 
cleave to my hand; and when they were 
joined together as if the sword grew out 
of my arm; and when the blood ran 
thorow my fingers, then I fought with 
most courage." Nowhere in all Shake- 
spear is there a touch like that of the 
blood running down through the man's 
fingers, and his courage rising to passion 
at it. Even in mere technical adaptation 
to the art of the actor, Bunyan's dra- 
matic speeches are as good as Shake- 
spear's tirades. Only a trained dramatic 
speaker can appreciate the terse man- 
ageableness and effectiveness of such a 
speech as this, with its grandiose exor- 
dium, followed up by its pointed ques- 
tion and its stern threat: "By this I 
perceive thou art one of my subjects; 
for all that country is mine and I am the 
Prince and the God of it. How is it 
then that thou hast ran away from thy 
King? Were it not that I hope thou 
mayst do me more service I would strike 
i8i 



thee now at one blow to the ground." 
Here there is no raving and swearing 
and rhyming and classical allusion. The 
sentences go straight to their mark; and 
their concluding phrases soar like the 
sunrise, or swing and drop like a ham- 
mer, just as the actor wants them. 
I might multiply these instances by the 
dozen; but I had rather leave dramatic 
students to compare the two authors at 
first hand. In an article on Bunyan 
lately published in the Contemporary 
Review — the only article worth reading 
on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank 
you : I am quite familiar with Macau- 
lay's patronizing prattle about The Pil- 
grim's Progress) — Mr. Richard Heath, 
the historian of the Anabaptists, shows 
how Bunyan learnt his lesson, not only 
from his own rough pilgrimage through 
life, but from the tradition of many an 
actual journey from real Cities of De- 
struction (under Alva), with Inter- 
preters' houses and convoy of Great- 
hearts all complete. Against such a man 
182 



what chance had our poor Immortal 
Wilham, with his " little Latin " (would 
it had been less like his Greek!), his 
heathen mythology, his Plutarch, his Boc- 
caccio, his Holinshed, his circle of Lon- 
don literary wits, soddening their minds 
w4th books and their nerves with alcohol 
(quite like us), and all the rest of his 
Strand and Fleet Street surroundings, 
activities and interests, social and profes- 
sional, mentionable and unmentionable? 
Let us applaud him, in due measure, 
in that he came out of It no black- 
guardedly Bohemian, but a thoroughly 
respectable snob; raised the desperation 
and cynicism of its outlook to something 
like sublimity In his tragedies; drama- 
tized Its morbid, self-centred passions 
and Its feeble and shallow speculations 
with all the force that was in them ; dis- 
infected it by copious doses of romantic 
poetry, fun, and common-sense ; and gave 
to Its perpetual sex-obsession the relief 
of Individual character and feminine wln- 
someness. Also — If you are a suffi- 

183 



clently good Whig — that after incarnat- 
ing the spirit of the whole epoch which 
began with the sixteenth century and is 
ending (I hope) with the nineteenth, he 
is still the idol of all well-read children. 
But as he never thought a noble life 
worth living or a great work worth 
doing, because the commercial profit and 
loss sheet shewed that the one did not 
bring happiness nor the other money, 
he never struck the great vein — the vein 
In which Bunyan told of that *' man of 
a very stout countenance " who went 
up to the keeper of the book of life 
and said, not " Out, out, brief candle," 
but " Set down my name, sir," and im- 
mediately fell on the armed men and 
cut his way Into heaven after receiving 
and giving many wounds. The Satur- 
day Review, 2nd January 1897. 

Judgment T UCIUS. Pshaw I You havc seen 

severed heads before, Caesar, and 

severed right hands too, I think; some 

thousands of them, In Gaul, after you 

184 



vanquished Vercingetorlx. Did you 
spare him, with all your clemency? Was 
that vengeance? 

C^SAR. No, by the Gods! would that 
it had been ! Vengeance at least is hu- 
man. No, I say: those severed right 
hands and the brave Vercingetorix basely 
strangled in a vault beneath the Capitol, 
were [with shuddering satire'] a wise se- 
verity, a necessary protection to the com- 
monwealth, a duty of statesmanship — 
follies and fictions ten times bloodier 
than honest vengeance ! What a fool 
was I then ! To think that men's lives 
should be at the mercy of such fools ! 
Casar and Cleopatra, pp. 123, 124. 

Vy/'HAT people call goodness has to Laodi 

be kept in check just as carefully 
as what they call badness ; for the human 
constitution will not stand very much of 
either without serious psychological mis- 
chief, ending in insanity or crime. The 
fact that the insanity may be privileged, 
as Savonarola's was, up to the point of 
i8s 



ceanism 



wrecking the social life of Florence, 
does not alter the case. We always hesi- 
tate to treat a dangerously good man as 
a lunatic because he may turn out to be 
a prophet In the true sense : that Is, a 
man of exceptional sanity who Is In the 
right when we are In the wrong. How- 
ever necessary It may have been to get 
rid of Savonarola, It was foolish to poi- 
son Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. 
But It Is none the less necessary to take 
a firm stand against the monstrous prop- 
osition that because certain attitudes and 
sentiments may be heroic and admirable 
at some momentous crisis, they should or 
can be maintained at the same pitch con- 
tinuously through life. A life spent in 
prayer and almsgiving is really as in- 
sane as a life spent in cursing and pick- 
ing pockets : the effect of everybody lead- 
ing it would be equally disastrous. 

Getting Married, pp. 137, 138. 

Ethical strain is just as bad for us as 

physical strain. It is desirable that the 

186 



normal pitch of conduct at which men 
are not conscious of being particularly 
virtuous, although they feel mean when 
they fall below it, should be raised as 
high as possible; but It is not desirable 
that they should attempt to live con- 
stantly above this pitch any more than 
that they should habitually walk at the 
rate of five miles an hour, or carry a 
hundredweight continually on their 
backs. Their normal condition should 
be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and 
it is a perfectly sound Instinct that leads 
us to mistrust the good man as much as 
the bad man, and to object to the clergy- 
man who Is pious extra-professionally as 
much as to th: professional pugilist who 
Is quarrelsome and violent In private life. 
We do not want good men and bad men 
any more than we want giants and 
dwarfs. What we do want is a high 
quality for our normal: that is, people 
who can be much better than what we 
now call respectable without self-sacri- 
fice. Conscious goodness, like conscious 

187 



Law 



muscular effort, may be of use in emer- 
gencies; but for everyday national use 
it is negligible ; and its effect on the char- 
acter of the individual may easily be 
disastrous. Getting Married, ^^, 138, 
139. 

TN a developing civilization nothing 
can make laws tolerable unless their 
changes and modifications are kept as 
closely as possible on the heels of the 
changes and modifications in social con- 
ditions which development involves. 
Also there is a bad side to the very 
convenience of law. It deadens the con- 
science of individuals by relieving them 
of the ethical responsibility of their own 
actions. The Sanity of Art. p. 52. 

Law is never so necessary as when it has 
no ethical significance whatever, and is 
pure law for the sake of law. The law 
that compels me to keep to the left when 
driving along Oxford Street is ethically 
senseless, as is shewn by the fact that 
keeping to the right answers equally well 
188 



In Paris; and It certainly destroys my 
freedom to choose my side; but by en- 
abling me to count on every one else 
keeping to the left also, thus making 
traffic possible and safe, it enlarges my 
life and sets my mind free for nobler 
issues. The Sanity of Art, p. 48. 

The continual danger to liberty created 
by law arises, not from the encroach- 
ments of Governments, which are always 
regarded with suspicion, but from the 
Immense utility and consequent popu- 
larity of law, and the terrifying danger 
and obvious Inconvenience of anarchy; 
so that even pirates appoint and obey a 
captain. Law soon acquires such a good 
character that people will believe no evil 
of It; and at this point it becomes pos- 
sible for priests and rulers to commit 
the most pernicious crimes in the name 
of law and order. 

The Sanity of Art, p. 5 i . 

Godhead, face to face with Stupidity, 
must compromise. Unable to enforce on 

189 



the world the pure law of thought, It 
must resort to a mechanical law of com- 
mandments to be enforced by brute pun- 
ishments and the destruction of the dis- 
obedient. And however carefully these 
laws are framed to represent the highest 
thoughts of the framers at the moment 
of their promulgation, before a day has 
elapsed that thought has grown and 
widened by the ceaseless evolution of 
life; and lo! yesterday's law already 
fallen out with today's thought. Yet 
If the high givers of that law themselves 
set the example of breaking It before It 
is a week old, they destroy all Its author- 
ity with their subjects, and so break the 
weapon they have forged to rule them 
for their own good. They must there- 
fore maintain at all costs the sanctity 
of the law, even when It has ceased to 
represent their thought; so that at last 
they get entangled In a network of or- 
dinances which they no longer believe In, 
and yet have made so sacred by custom 
and so terrible by punishment, that they 
190 



cannot themselves escape from them. 
Thus Wotan's resort to law finally costs 
him half the integrity of his godhead — 
as if a spiritual king, to gain temporal 
power, had plucked out one of his eyes 
— and at last he begins secretly to long 
for the advent of some power higher 
than himself which will destroy his arti- 
ficial empire of law, and establish a true 
republic of free thought. 

The Perfect Wagnerite, p. ii. 

TV/TODERN civilization is reduced to The Law 

absurdity by obvious and mon- 
strous inequalities and injustices in the 
distribution of wealth and the encour- 
agement of labor. The well-to-do-man 
ascribes these to inequalities of charac- 
ter, to improvidence, intemperance and 
laziness being beaten in the race by 
thrift, sobriety and industry. The poor 
man pleads that he is unlucky. Both will 
tell you that if an equal distribution of 
goods were made now, all the present 
inequalities would presently reappear, 
191 



This Is quite true, and would be equally 
true if the equal distribution of goods 
were accompanied by an equal and per- 
manent distribution of character. Char- 
acter is a negligible factor in the busi- 
ness. The real importance of the law 
of rent is that it shews how the govern- 
ing factor in the distribution of wealth 
is not the individual human producer, 
but the material at his disposal and the 
place in which he works. Faculty is tol- 
erably equally divided; but soils and 
situations vary enormously. And so in 
the course of time the proprietors of the 
better soils and the masters of the better 
situations become rich without working 
at all, and accumulate spare money. 
And spare money, according to the 
terse and perfect definition of Jevons, is 
capital : the most important of all the 
factors in production nowadays. This 
science of rent is the foundation of mod- 
ern economic socialism, the greatest 
revolutionary force of your time. Life, 
Literature and Political Economy. 
192 



Clare Market Review , January 1906, 

nPHERE are often profoundly moral The Lie 

necessities at the back of a lie; and 
It Is often well to give a false conscious- 
ness to another person. Illusions play 
a large and often beneficial part in hu- 
man conduct; and truth may mean false- 
hood to people Incapable of It: a nurse's 
reason to a child may be of more use to 
the child than the reason Socrates would 
have given to Plato on the same point. 
Life, Literature and Political Economy. 
Clare Market Review, January 1906, 

p. 29. 

11 - 

T) ATIONALLY considered, life Is The Life 

only worth living when Its pleasures ^°'"*^® 
are greater than Its pains. Now to a 
generation which has ceased to believe in 
heaven, and has not yet learned that the 
degradation by poverty of four out of 
every five of Its number Is artificial and 
remediable, the fact that life is not worth 

193 



living is obvious. Is Is useless to pre- 
tend that the pessimism of Koheleth, 
Shakespear, Dryden and Swift can be re- 
futed if the world progresses solely by 
the destruction of the unfit, and yet can 
only maintain its civilization by manu- 
facturing the unfit in swarms of which 
that appalling proportion of four to one 
represents but the comparatively fit sur- 
vivors. Plainly, then, the reasonable 
thing for the rationalists to do Is to 
refuse to live. But as none of them will 
commit suicide in obedience to this dem- 
onstration of " the necessity " for it, 
there is an end of the notion that we live 
for reasons instead of In fulfilment of 
our will to live. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 13. 

Demonstrate to me that life is relig- 
iously, morally, scientifically, politically, 
philosophically and practically not worth 
going on with, and I must reply, So 
much the worse, not for life, but for 
what you call religion, science, politics, 
194 



philosophy, and the current practice of 
the art of living. There is something 
wrong with these things if they lead to 
nihilistic conclusions. Civilization and 
the Soldier. The Humane Review, Jan- 
uary 1901, p. 302. 

It was not the Churches but that very 
freethinking philosopher Schopenhauer 
who re-established the old theological 
doctrine that reason is no motive power; 
that the true motive power in the world 
is will (otherwise Life) ; and that the 
setting-up of reason above will is a dam- 
nable error. But the theologians could 
not open their arms to Schopenhauer, be- 
cause he fell into the Rationalist-Mer- 
cantilist error of valuing life according 
to its individual profits in pleasure, and 
of course came to the idiotic pessimist 
conclusion that life is not worth living, 
and that the will which urges us to live 
in spite of this is necessarily a malign 
torturer, or at least a bad hand at busi- 
ness, the desirable end of all things being 

I9S 



the Nirvana of the stilling of the will 
and the consequent setting of life's 
sun " into the blind cave of eternal 
night." . . . 

We can now, as soon as we are strong- 
minded enough, drop the Nirvana non- 
sense, the pessimism, the rationalism, the 
supernatural theology, and all the other 
subterfuges to which we cling because we 
are afraid to look life straight in the 
face and see in it, not the fulfilment of 
a moral law or of the deductions of rea- 
son, but the satisfaction of a passion in 
us of which we can give no rational ac- 
count whatever. 

It is natural for man to shrink from the 
terrible responsibility thrown on him by 
this inexorable fact. 

The Sanity of Art, pp. 57, 58. 

I suggest to you that the reason why we 
go on striving to understand life better 
instead of confining ourselves to mere 
pleasure hunting, is that this mysterious 
force behind us — I will call it the Life 
196 



Force— Is Itself In desperate need of an 
organ of intelligent consciousness; and 
that the human mind Is its most elab- 
orate experiment In the evolution of such 
an organ. Life, Literature and Politi- 
cal Economy. The Clare Market Re- 
view, January 1906, p. 28. 

Do you see that the reason you will de- 
cide to continue living is that you have 
in hand the pressing business of conquer- 
ing for the Life Force a larger, 
higher, more intelligent, more compre- 
hensive consciousness : In short to enable 
It to economize? Life, Literature and 
Political Economy. Clare Market Re- 
view, January 1906, p. 28. 

DON JUAN. Man gives every reason 
for his conduct save one, every excuse 
for his crimes save one, every plea for 
his safety save one; and that one Is his 
cowardice. Yet all his civilization Is 
founded on his cowardice, on his abject 
tameness, which he calls his respectabil- 
ity. There are limits to what a mule 

197 



or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer 
himself to be degraded until his vlleness 
becomes so loathsome to his oppressors 
that they themselves are forced to re- 
form it. 

THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are 
the creatures In whom you discover what 
you call a Life Force ! 
DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the 
most surprising part of the whole busi- 
ness. 

THE STATUE. What's that? 
DON JUAN. Why, that you can make 
any of these cowards brave by simply 
putting an Idea Into his head. 

THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old sol- 
dier I admit the cowardice: It's as uni- 
versal as sea sickness, and matters just 
as little. But that about putting an Idea 
Into a man's head is stuff and nonsense. 
In a battle all you need to make you fight 
is a little hot blood and the knowledge 
that It's more dangerous to lose than to 
win. 

198 



DON JUAN. That Is perhaps why bat- 
tles are so useless. But men never really 
overcome fear until they imagine they 
are fighting to further a universal pur- 
pose — fighting for an Idea, as they call It. 
Why was the Crusader braver than the 
pirate? Because he fought, not for him- 
self, but for the Cross. What force 
was It that met him with a valor as reck- 
less as his own? The force of men who 
fought, not for themselves, but for Is- 
lam. 

Man and Superman^ pp. 109, no. 

ANA. Is there nothing in heaven but 
contemplation, Juan? 
DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no 
other joy. But there is the work of 
helping Life In Its struggle upward. 
Think of how it wastes and scatters it- 
self, how it raises up obstacles to itself 
and destroys itself in Its Ignorance and 
blindness. It needs a brain, this Irre- 
sistible force, lest in its ignorance It 
should resist Itself. What a piece of 
199 



work is a man! says the poet. Yes: but' 
what a blunderer! Here is the highest 
miracle of organization yet attained by 
Hfe, the most intensely alive thing that 
exists, the most conscious of all the or- 
ganisms; and yet, how wretched are his 
brains ! Stupidity made sordid and cruel 
by the realities learnt from toil and pov- 
erty: Imagination resolved to starve 
sooner than face these realities, piling 
up illusions to hide them, and calling it- 
self cleverness, genius ! And each accus- 
ing the other of its own defect : Stupidity 
accusing Imagination of folly, and Im- 
agination accusing Stupidity of ignor- 
ance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all 
the knowledge, and Imagination all the 
intelligence. 

Man and Superman, pp. 105, 106. 

If we could only realize that though 
the Life Force supplies us with its 
own purpose, it has no other brains to 
work with than those it has painfully 
and imperfectly evolved in our heads, 
200 



the peoples of the earth would learn 
some pity for their gods; and we should 
have a religion that would not be con- 
tradicted at every turn by the thing that 
is giving the He to the thing that ought 
to be. 

The Irrational Knot, pp. xxv., xxvl. 

DON JUAN. I tell you that as long as I 
can conceive something better than my- 
self I cannot be easy unless I am striving 
to bring It Into existence or clearing the 
way for It. That Is the law of my life. 
That Is the working within me of Life's 
Incessant aspiration to higher organiza- 
tion, wider, deeper, Intenser self-con- 
sciousness, and clearer self-understand- 
ing. Man and Superman, p. 129. 

DON JUAN. A picture gallery is a dull 
place for a blind man. But even as you 
enjoy the contemplation of such roman- 
tic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so 
would I enjoy the contemplation of that 
which Interests me above all things : 
namely. Life : the force that ever strives 
201 



to attain greater power of contemplating 
itself. What made this brain of mine, 
do you think? Not the need to move 
my limbs; for a rat with half my brains 
moves as well as I. Not merely the 
need to do, but the need to know what 
I do, lest in my blind efforts to live 
I should be slaying myself. 

Man and Superman, p. 105. 

DON JUAN. Just as Life, after ages of 
struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily 
organ the eye, so that the living organ- 
ism could see where it was going and 
what was coming to help or threaten it, 
and thus avoid a thousand dangers that 
formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day 
a mind's eye that shall see, not the physi- 
cal world, but the purpose of Life, and 
thereby enable the individual to work 
for that purpose instead of thwarting 
and baffling it by setting up shortsighted 
personal aims as at present. 

Man and Superman, p. 115, 



202 



T HAVE a very poor opinion of Lon- London 

don In Its collective capacity. It 
is alike Incapable of appreciating a bene- 
fit and of resenting an outrage. For 
example, one of the finest views In the 
world is within a minute's walk of 
Charing Cross. Go down Villiers Street 
and ascend the first stairs to your right 
after you pass the music hall. This 
brings you Into the loggia attached to 
the wall of the South-Eastern terminus, 
and leading to the Hungerford foot- 
bridge. He who designed this loggia 
was no Orcagna, though he had such a 
chance as Orcagna never had in Flor- 
ence. It is a dismal square hole in a 
.mass of dirty bricks, through which men 
hurry with loathing. Yet if you look 
out through one of the holes — prefer- 
ably the last but one — made for the 
convenience of the east wind, you will 
find the view magnificent. Right into 
one of the foci of that view, London, 
without a murmur, permitted Mr. Jabez 
203 



Balfour to dump the building which is 
now the Hotel Cecil, just as it allowed 
the London Pavilion Music-hall to spoil 
Piccadilly Circus. If that building had 
darkened the smallest window of a rag 
and bone shop, the proprietor thereof 
would have been supported by all the 
might of the State in maintaining his 
" Ancient Lights." But because all Lon- 
don — nay, all the world that visits Lon- 
don — was injured, there was no placard 
with " Ancient View " on it put up in 
that grimy loggia. If the malefactor 
had confined himself to injuring the pub- 
lic collectively, he would by this time 
have been one of our most eminent citi- 
zens. Unfortunately, he trifled with pri- 
vate property; and we instantly stretched 
out our hand to the uttermost parts of 
the earth whither he had fled; seized 
him; and cast him into prison. If the 
question had been one of beneficence In- 
stead of maleficence, we should have 
shewn the same hyperassthesia to a pri- 
204 



vate advantage, the same anaesthesia to 

a public one. 

The Saturday Review^ ist May 1897. 

. . . the London in which the people 
who pay to be amused by my dramatic 
representation of Peter Shirley turned 
out to starve at forty because there are 
younger slaves to be had for his wages, 
do not take, and have not the slightest 
intention of taking, any effective step to 
organize society in such a way as to 
make that everyday Infamy Impossible. 
Major Barbara, p. 178. 



T ET realism have Its demonstration, Love 
"^ comedy its criticism, or even baw- 
dry Its horselaugh at the expense of sex- 
ual Infatuation, if it must: but to ask us 
to subject our souls to Its ruinous glamor, 
to worship it, deify it, and imply that 
it alone makes our life worth living, Is 
nothing but folly gone mad erotlcally. 
Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxix. 
205 



Think of how some of our married 
friends worry one another, tax one an- 
other, are jealous of one another, cant 
bear to let one another out of sight for 
a day, are more like jailers and slave- 
owners than lovers. Think of those 
very same people with their enemies, 
scrupulous, lofty, self-respecting, deter- 
mined to be independent of one another, 
careful of how they speak of one an- 
other — pooh ! havent you often thought 
that if they only knew it, they were 
better friends to their enemies than to 
their own husbands and wives? 

The Devil's Disciple, p. 32. 

Ma'chine- TJNDERSHAFT. I want a man with 
Made Man ^^ no relations and no schooling: that 
is, a man who would be out of the run- 
ning altogether if he were not a strong 
man. And I cant find him. Every 
blessed foundling nowadays is snapped 
up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, 
or School Board officers, or Boards of 
Guardians: and if he shews the least 
206 



ability, he Is fastened on by schoolmas- 
ters; trained to win scholarships like a 
race-horse; crammed with second-hand 
Ideas; drilled and disciplined In docility 
and what they call good taste ; and lamed 
for life so that he Is fit for nothing but 
teaching. Major Barbara, p. 275. 

/^ET on your legs and talk the cur- The Mani- 
^^ rent party Manicheism, according ife'^™ °^ 
to which there are two great parties rep- p°^'**<=s 
resenting two great principles, the one 
wholly malign and the other wholly be- 
neficent, composed of two different or- 
ders of beings, the one angelic and the 
other diabolic; and everything silly, 
everything drunken, infatuated, fanati- 
cal, envious, quarrelsome, in short, fool- 
ish in the audience responds to you at 
once. Assume, on the other hand, that 
one Government is very like* another, 
and that nothing will wreck a Govern- 
ment except a refusal to go where It 
Is driven, or an attempt to go where it 
Is not driven (especially If the recalcl- 
207 



trance be made a matter of party prin- 
ciple), and at once your audience is as 
happy and sensible as it is In the nature 
of an audience to be. But nobody at 
present combines the requisite political 
detachment with the requisite critical 
training except the art critic. I there- 
fore look forward to the time when elec- 
tion meetings will be advertised by plac- 
ards headed, " No Politics," and dis- 
playing a list of speakers headed, in the 
largest type, with the name of some 
noted critic of pictures, music, the 
drama, or literature. And the end of 
that will be that some bold editor will 
at last take the step I have vainly urged 
for years, and conduct the criticism of 
politics In his paper exactly as he now 
conducts the criticism of art. 
The Saturday Review^ 20th July 1895. 

Marat and T E AN PAUL MARAT, " pCOplc's 

corday ^ J f rlcnd " and altruist par excellence, 
was a man just after our playgoers' own 
hearts — a man whose virtue consisted in 
208 



burning indignation at the sufferings of 
others and an Intense desire to see them 
balanced by an exemplary retaliation. 
That Is to say, his morality was the 
morality of the melodrama, and of the 
gallery which applauds frantically when 
the hero knocks the villain down. It is 
only by coarsely falsifying Marat's char- 
acter that he has been made into an 
iVdelphi villain — nay, prevented from 
bringing down the house as an Adelphi 
hero, as he certainly would If the audi- 
ence could be shewn the horrors that pro- 
voked him and the personal disinterest- 
edness and sincerity with which he threw 
himself into a war of extermination 
against tyranny. Ibsen may have earned 
the right to prove by the example of 
such men as Marat that these virtues 
were the making of a scoundrel more 
mischievous than the most openly vi- 
cious aristocrat for whose head he clam- 
ored; but the common run of our 
playgoers will have none of Ibsen's mo- 
rality, and as much of Marat's as our 
209 



romantic dramatists can stuff them with. 
Charlotte Corday herself was simply a 
female Marat. She, too, hated tyranny 
and Idealized her passionate Instinct for 
bloody retaliation. There Is the true 
tragic Irony In Marat's death at her 
hand: It was not really murder: It was 
suicide — Marat slain by the spirit of 
Marat. No bad theme for a playwright 
capable of handling It! The Saturday 
Review, 5th February 1898. 

Marriage TTXON JUAN. Send mc to the galleys 
^^^ and chain me to the felon whose 
number happens to be next to mine ; and 
I must accept the Inevitable and make 
the best of the companionship. Many 
such companionships, they tell me, are 
touchlngly affectionate; and most are at 
least tolerably friendly. But that does 
not make a chain a desirable ornament 
nor the galleys an abode of bliss. Those 
who talk most about the blessings of 
marriage and the constancy of Its vows 
are the very people who declare that If 
210 



the chain were broken and the prison- 
ers left free to choose, the whole social 
fabric would fly asunder. You cannot 
have the argument both ways. If the 
prisoner is happy, why lock him in? 
If he is not, why pretend that he is? 

Man and Superman, p. 122. 

However much we may all suffer through 
marriage, most of us think so little about 
it that we regard it as a fixed part of 
the order of nature, like gravitation. 
Except for this error, which may be re- 
garded as constant, we use the word with 
reckless looseness, meaning a dozen dif- 
ferent things by it, and yet always as- 
suming that to a respectable man it can 
have only one meaning. The pious citi- 
zen, suspecting the Socialist (for exam- 
ple) of unmentionable things, and ask- 
ing him heatedly whether he wishes to 
abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense 
of unanswerable quibbling when the So- 
cialist asks him what particular variety 
of marriage he means: English civil 
211 



marriage, sacramental marriage, Indis- 
soluble Roman Catholic marriage, mar- 
riage of divorced persons, Scotch mar- 
riage, Irish marriage, French, German, 
Turkish, or South Dakotan marriage. 
/In Norway and Sweden, two of the most 
highly civilized countries In the world, 
a marriage Is dissolved If both parties 
wish It, without any question of conduct. 
That Is what marriage means In Scan- 
dinavia. In Clapham that Is what they 
call by the senseless name of Free Love. 
In the British Empire we have unlimited 
Kulln polygamy, Muslim polygamy lim- 
ited to four wives, child marriages, and, 
nearer home, marriages of first cousins : 
all of them abominations In the eyes of 
many worthy persons. Not only may the 
respectable British champion of mar- 
riage mean any of these widely different 
Institutions ; sometimes he does not mean 
marriage at all. He means monogamy, 
chastity, temperance, respectability, mo-' 
rallty, Christianity, antl-soclalism, and a 
dozen other things that have no neces- 



212 



sary connection with marriage. He 
often means something that he dare not 
avow: ownership of the person of an- 
other human being, for Instance. And 
he never tells the truth about his own 
marriage either to himself or anyone 
else. Getting Married, pp. 121, 122. 

If we adopt the common romantic as- 
sumption that the object of marriage Is 
bliss, then the very strongest reason for 
dissolving a marriage is that It shall be 
disagreeable to one or other or both of 
the parties. If we accept the view that 
the object of marriage is to provide for 
the production and rearing of children, 
then childlessness should be a conclusive 
reason for dissolution. As neither of 
these causes entitles married persons to 
divorce in England, It is at once clear 
that our marriage law Is not founded 
on either assumption. What it Is really 
founded on Is the morality of the tenth 
commandment, which Englishwomen 
will one day succeed In obliterating from 
213 



the walls of our churches by refusing 
to enter any building where they are 
publicly classed with a man's house, his 
ox, and his ass, as his purchased chat- 
tels. Getting Married, p. 123. 

It is remarkable that the very people 
who romance most absurdly about the 
closeness and sacredness of the marriage 
tie are also those who are most convinced 
that the man's sphere and the woman's 
sphere are so entirely separate that only 
in their leisure moments can they ever 
be together. 

Getting Married, p. 140. 

The common notion that the existing 
forms of marriage are not political con- 
trivances, but sacred ethical obligations 
to which everything, even the very ex- 
istence of the human race must be sac- 
rificed If necessary (and this Is what the 
vulgar morality we mostly profess on 
the subject comes to), Is one on which 
no sane Government could act for a 
moment; and yet It Influences, or Is be- 
214 



lieved to Influence, so many votes, that 
no Government will touch the marriage 
question If It can possibly help It. 

Getting Married, p. 142. 
The religious revolt against marriage Is 
a very old one. Christianity began with 
a fierce attack on marriage; and to this 
day the celibacy of the Roman Catholic 
priesthood Is a standing protest against 
Its compatibility with the higher life. 
St. Paul's reluctant sanction of marriage; 
his personal protest that he countenanced 
If of necessity and against his own con- 
viction; his contemptuous "better to 
marry than to burn " is only out of date 
In respect of his belief that the end of 
the world was at hand, and that there 
was therefore no longer any population 
question. His Instinctive recoil from Its 
worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure 
which Induces two people to accept slav- 
ery to one another has remained an ac- 
tive force in the world to this day, and 
Is now stirring more uneasily than ever. 
Getting Married, ^^. 126, 127. 

215 



I have never met anybody really In fa- 
vor of maintaining marriage as It exists 
in England to-day. A Roman Catholic 
may obey his Church by assenting ver- 
bally to the doctrine of indissoluble 
marriage. But nobody worth counting 
believes directly, frankly, and instinct- 
ively that when a person commits a mur- 
der and is put into prison for twenty 
years for it, the free and Innocent hus- 
band or wife of that murderer should 
remain bound by the marriage. To putf 
it briefly, a contract for better for worse 
Is a contract that should not be toler- 
ated. Getting Married, p. 122. 

SSria e A ^^^^ twcnty-sIx ycars ago a some- 
Laws '*^^ what similar dilemma to that In 
Mr. Esmond's play ( The Divided 
fVay) arose between three persons no 
less famous than Wagner, Hans von Bu- 
low, and Liszt's daughter, Cosima von 
Bulow. Madame von Bulow preferred 
to spend her life with Wagner, just as 
Mrs. Humeden in the play preferred to 
216 



spend her life with Gaunt. The change 
was effected with the happiest results: 
at least I am not aware that anybody 
was a penny the worse — certainly not 
Madame Wagner, who holds her court 
at Bayreuth with a dignity which many 
actual princesses might, and probably 
do, envy. Far be it from me to suggest 
anarchical violations of our marriage 
laws rather than an orderly agitation for 
constitutional reform of them in har- 
mony with the higher morality of our 
own times; but I do venture to remark 
that people who decline to carry obedi- 
ence to that law too far are at least as 
interesting dramatically as people who 
forge and murder, and that the notion 
that the consequences of such disobedi- 
ence, when carried out in good faith by 
respectable people (George Eliot, for 
example), are necessarily so awful that 
suicide is the more reasonable alterna- 
tive, is a piece of nonsense that might as 
well be dropped on the stage. No hu- 
man institution could stand the strain of 
217 



the monstrous assumptions on which our 
existing marriage laws proceed if we 
were really sincere about them; and 
though there is much to be said for our 
English method of maintaining social 
order by collectively maintaining the sa- 
credness of our moral ideals whilst we 
individually mitigate their severity by 
evasion, collusion, and never seeing any- 
thing until our attention is compelled by 
legal proceedings, yet the abuse of this 
system of toleration by people whose 
conduct we are not prepared to excuse, 
but who cannot very well be exposed if 
the excusable people are to be spared, is 
landing us in looser views than we ever 
bargained for. Already we have an 
aimlessly rebellious crusade against mar- 
riage altogether, and a curious habit of 
circumspection on the part of the experi- 
enced man of the world, who, when 
newly introduced to an English house- 
hold, picks his way very cautiously un- 
til he has ascertained whether the hus- 
band and wife really would be husband 
218 



and wife in France or Germany or South 
Dakota, and, if his conclusion is un- 
favorable, which friend of the family is 
Mr. Gaunt Humeden, so to speak. Not 
that the domestic situations which are 
not white are all necessarily jet black or 
even disagreeably grey ; but the fact that 
under the English law a mistake in mar- 
riage cannot be effectively remedied ex- 
cept by the disgrace of either party — that 
is to say, cannot be remedied at all by de- 
cent people, divorce being thus a boon re- 
served for the dissolute — is continually 
producing a supply of cases not at all dis- 
similar to that which is the subject of Mr. 
Esmond's play. Most of them are set- 
tled, not by suicide, nor by flights into 
Egypt, but by the parties drifting along, 
nobody doing anything wrong, and no- 
body doing anything right, all seeing 
enough of one another to make them con- 
tented faiite de mieux, whilst maintaining 
their honor intact. Whether this custom- 
ary and convenable solution is really bet- 
ter — say in its effect on the children who 
219 



grow up observing it — than the violent 
method of open scandal and coliusory di- 
vorce, involving the public announcement 
of cruelties and adulteries which have 
never been committed, is an open ques- 
tion, not admitting of a general answer. 
Obviously, the ideal husband and wife 
who give all their affection to one an- 
other, and maintain a state of cold in- 
difference to everyone else, should be 
executed without benefit of clergy as a 
couple of heartless monopolists; for the 
idealist may be safely challenged to pro- 
duce a single instance of a thoroughly 
happy marriage in which the affection 
which makes the marriage happy does 
not extend to a wide circle of friends. 
Just as good mothers and fathers love 
all lovable children, so good wives and 
husbands love all lovable husbands and 
wives. People with this gift of heart 
are not prevented from marrying by 
Don Juan's difficulty: they can be faith- 
ful to one without being unfaithful to all 
the rest. Unfortunately, they are no 
220 



more common than the domestic terrors 
who are utterly incapable of living with 
anybody on tolerable terms. Family 
life may mean anything between these 
two extremes, from that of the southern 
countries where the guide-book warns 
the English tourist that If he asks a man 
after his wife's health he will probably 
be challenged to fight a duel, or that of 
the English stage, where the same evil 
construction is maintained on the same 
pretence of jealousy for private morality 
and the honor of womanhood, to the 
most cultivated sections of English and 
American society, where people think of 
our existing marriage law much as Mat- 
thew Arnold thought about Tennyson, 
and unfortunately keep their opinion to 
themselves with equal " good taste." 
The practical result Is, superhuman pre- 
tension, extravagant hypocrisy, toler- 
ance of every sort of misconduct — pro- 
vided it Is clandestine, and, of course, a 
conspiracy of silence. The Saturday 
Review, 30th November 1895. 
221 



Marrkge VXT'HEN the great protest of the slx- 
Reforma- teenth ccntury came, and the 

Church was reformed In several coun- 
tries, the Reformation was so largely a 
rebellion against sacerdotalism that mar- 
riage was very nearly excommunicated 
again, as It had been by the early Chris- 
tians: our modern civil marriage, round 
which so many fierce controversies and 
political conflicts have raged, would 
have been thoroughly approved of by 
Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. 
But the Instinctive doctrine that there Is 
something holy and mystic In sex, a doc- 
trine which many of us now easily disso- 
ciate from any priestly ceremony, but 
which In those days seemed to all who 
felt It to need a ritual affirmation, could 
not be thrown on the scrap-heap with 
the sale of Indulgences and the like; and 
so the Reformation left marriage where 
It was: a curious mixture of commercial 
sex slavery, early Christian sex abhor- 
rence, and later Christian sex sanctlfica- 
tion. Getting Married, p. 196. 



]V/f ATERIALISM only Isolated the 
great mystery of consciousness by 
clearing away several petty mysteries 
with which we had confused it; just as 
rationalism isolated the great mystery 
of the will to live. The isolation made 
both more conspicuous than before. 
We thought we had escaped for ever 
from the cloudy region of metaphysics; 
and we were only carried further into 
the heart of them. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 14. 

Ibsen's writings shew how well he knew 
the crushing weight with which the sor- 
did cares of the ordinary struggle for 
money and respectability fell on the 
world when the romance of the creeds 
was discredited, and progress seemed for 
the moment to mean, not the growth of 
the spirit of man, but an effect of the 
survival of the fittest brought about by 
the destruction of the unfit, all the most 
frightful examples of this systematic de- 
struction being thrust Into the utmost 
223 



prominence by those who were fighting 
the Church with Mill's favorite dialecti- 
cal weapon, the incompatibility of divine 
omnipotence with divine benevolence. 
His plays are full of evidence of his 
overwhelming sense of the necessity of 
rousing the individual into self-assertion 
against this numbing fatalism; and yet 
he never seems to have freed his intellect 
wholly from the acceptance of its scien- 
tific validity. That it only accounted for 
progress at all on the hypothesis of a 
continuous increase in the severity of the 
conditions of existence — that is, on an 
assumption of just the reverse of what 
was actually taking place — appears to 
have escaped Ibsen as completely as it 
has escaped Professor Huxley himself. 
It is true that he did not allow himself 
to be stopped by this gloomy fortress of 
pessimism and materialism : his genius 
pushed him past It, but without intellec- 
tually reducing It; and the result is, that 
as far as one can guess, he went on be- 
lieving it impregnable, not dreaming 
224 



that It has been demolished, and that too 
with ridiculous ease, by the mere march 
behind him of the working class, which, 
by Its freedom from the characteristic 
bias of the middle classes, has escaped 
their characteristic Illusions, and solved 
many of the enigmas which they found 
Insoluble because they wished to find 
them so. His prophetic belief In the 
spontaneous growth of the will makes 
him a mellorlst without reference to the 
operation of natural selection; but his 
Impression of the light thrown by physi- 
cal and biological science on the facts of 
life seems to be the gloomy one of the 
period at which he must have received 
his education In these departments. Ex- 
ternal nature often plays her most ruth- 
less and destructive part In his works, 
which have an extraordinary fascination 
for the pessimists of that school, in spite 
of the incompatibility of his individual- 
ism with that mechanical utilitarian ethic 
of theirs which treats Man as the sport 
225 



of every circumstance, and Ignores his 
will altogether. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 63, 64. 

Maternity jOLATO long ago poIntcd out the im- 
portance of being governed by men 
with a sufficient sense of responsibility 
and comprehension of public duties to 
be very reluctant to undertake the work 
of governing; and yet we have taken 
his Instruction so little to heart that we 
are at present suffering acutely from 
government by gentlemen who will 
stoop to all the mean shifts of election- 
eering and Incur all Its heavy expenses 
for the sake of a seat In Parliament. 
But what our sentimentalists have not 
yet been told Is that exactly the same 
thing applies to maternity as to govern- 
ment. The best mothers are not those 
who are so enslaved by their primitive 
Instincts that they will bear children no 
matter how hard the conditions are, but 
precisely those who place a very high 
price on their services, and are quite 

226 



prepared to become old maids if the 
price is refused, and even to feel re- 
lieved at their escape. Our democratic 
and matrimonial institutions may have 
their merits : at all events they are most- 
ly reforms of something worse; but they 
put a premium on want of self-respect 
in certain very important matters; and 
the consequence is that we are very bad- 
ly governed and are, on the whole, an 
ugly, mean, ill-bred race. Getting Mar- 
ried, pp. 153, 154. 

A COMPARISON of the works of Meat and 

our carnivorous drunkard poets 
with those of Shelley, or of Dr. John- 
son's dictionary with that of the vege- 
tarian Littre, is sufficient to shew that 
the secret of attaining the highest emi- 
nence either in poetry or in dictionary 
compiling (and all fine literature lies 
between the two), is to be found neither 
in alcohol nor in our monstrous habit 
of bringing millions of useless and dis- 
agreeable animals into existence for the 
227 



Drink 



express purpose of barbarously slaugh- 
tering them, roasting their corpses, and 
eating them. On Going to Church. 
The Savoy, January 1896, pp. 16, 17. 

M V ai 'W'OTHING is more dangerous than 
Profession ^^ a poor doctor : not even a poor em- 
ployer or a poor landlord. The Doc- 
tor's Dilemma, p. xcl. 

It is not the fault of our doctors that 
the medical service of the community, 
as at present provided for, is a murder- 
ous absurdity. That any sane nation, 
having observed that you could provide 
for the supply of bread by giving bakers 
a pecuniary interest In baking for you, 
should go on to give a surgeon a pecun- 
iary interest in cutting off your leg, Is 
enough to make one despair of political 
humanity. But that Is precisely what 
we have done. And the more appalling 
the mutilation, the more the mutilator Is 
paid. He who corrects the Ingrowing 
toe-nail receives a few shillings: he who 
228 



cuts your inside out receives hundreds 
of guineas, except when he does it to a 
poor person for practice. 
Scandalized voices murmur that these 
operations are necessary. They may 
be. It may also be necessary to hang 
a man or pull down a house. But we 
take good care not to make the hang- 
man and the housebreaker the judges 
of that. If we did, no man's neck 
would be safe and no man's house stable. 
But we do make the doctor the judge, 
and fine him anything from sixpence to 
several hundred guineas if he decides 
in our favour. The Doctor's Dilemma^ 
p. V. 

Doctors are just like other Englishmen: 
most of them have no honor and no con- 
science: what they commonly mistake 
for these is sentimentality and an Intense 
dread of doing anything that everybody 
else does not do, or omitting to do any- 
thing that everybody else does. This 
of course does amount to a sort of work- 
229 



Ing or rule-of-thumb conscience; but it 
means that you will do anything, good 
or bad, provided you get enough people 
to keep you In countenance by doing It 
also. It Is the sort of conscience that 
makes It possible to keep order on a 
pirate ship, or In a troop of brigands. 
The Doctor's Dilemma, p. vIII. 

No doctor dare accuse another of mal- 
practice. He Is not sure enough of his 
own opinion to ruin another man by it. 
He knows that If such conduct were 
tolerated in his profession no doctor's 
livelihood or reputation would be worth 
a year's purchase. I do not blame him : 
I should do the same myself. But the 
effect of this state of things Is to make 
the medical profession a conspiracy to 
hide its own shortcomings. No doubt 
the same may be said of all professions. 
They are all conspiracies against the 
laity; and I do not suggest that the 
medical conspiracy Is either better or 
worse than the military conspiracy, the 
230 



legal conspiracy, the sacerdotal con- 
spiracy, the pedagogic conspiracy, the 
royal and aristocratic conspiracy, the 
literary and artistic conspiracy, and the 
innumerable industrial, commercial, and 
financial conspiracies, from the trade 
unions to the great exchanges, which 
make up the huge conflict which we call 
society. But it is less suspected. The 
Doctor's Dilemma, pp. xiv., xv. 

TT NFORTUNATELY, a really good Melodrama 

Adelphi melodrama Is very hard to 
get. It should be a simple and sincere 
drama of action and feeling, kept well 
within that vast tract of passion and 
motives which Is common to the philoso- 
pher and the laborer, relieved by plenty 
of fun, and depending for variety of hu- 
man character, not on the high comedy 
idiosyncrasies which individualize peo- 
ple In spite of the closest similarity of 
age, sex, and circumstances, but on 
broad contrasts between types of youth 
and age, sympathy and selfishness, the 
231 



masculine and the feminine, the serious 
and the frivolous, the sublime and the 
ridiculous, and so on. The whole 
character of the piece must be allegori- 
cal, idealistic, full of generalizations 
and moral lessons ; and it must represent 
conduct as producing swiftly and cer- 
tainly on the individual the results which 
in actual life it only produces on the 
race in the course of many centuries. 
All of which, obviously, requires for its 
accomplishment rather greater heads 
and surer hands than we commonly find 
in the service of the playhouse. The 
Saturday Review, 20th April 1895. 

^^^^ttTta T ^^ ^^^ approve of private property 
in land, and I regard the appropria- 
tion of the ground rent of London by 
the present ground landlords as grossly 
inequitable; but were I asked on that 
account to finance a burglary in the 
Duke of Westminster's house, I should 
refuse. I am constantly teaching peo- 
ple that they must reform society before 
232 



they can reform themselves, and that 
individual sallies of rebellion are use- 
less and suicidal. Correspondence. 

HP HE whole difficulty of bringing up Middle 
a family well is the difficulty of uns^oda- 
making its members behave as consid- ^^^^ 
erately at home as on a visit in a strange 
house, and as frankly, kindly, and easily 
in a strange house as at home. In the 
middle classes, where the segregation of 
the artificially limited family in its little 
brick box is horribly complete, bad man- 
ners, ugly dresses, awkwardness, cow- 
ardice, peevishness, and all the petty 
vices of unsociability flourish like mush- 
rooms in a cellar. In the upper class, 
where families are not limited for 
money reasons; where at least two 
houses and sometimes three or four are 
the rule (not to mention the clubs) ; 
where there is travelling and hotel life; 
and where the men are brought up, not 
in the family, but in public schools, uni- 
versities, and the naval and military 

233 



services, besides being constantly In so- 
cial training in other people's houses, the 
result is to produce what may be called, 
in comparison with the middle class, 
something that might almost pass as 
a different and much more sociable 
species. And in the very poorest class, 
where people have no homes, only sleep- 
ing places, and consequently live practi- 
cally in the streets, sociability again ap- 
pears, leaving the middle class despised 
and disliked for its helpless and offensive 
unsociability as much by those below it 
as those above it, and yet ignorant 
enough to be proud of it, and to hold 
itself up as a model for the reform of 
the (as it considers) elegantly vicious 
rich and profligate poor alike. Getting 
Married, pp. 169, 170. 

JJif Right npHERE is no more identity or neces- 

sary connection between might and 

right than between chalk and cheese. 

Every man strives for might so that his 

will may prevail ; and when he attains 

234 



it his will prevails whether it is right 
or wrong. That Will, like gravitation, 
is a force in itself, is true; and that the 
human race cannot really will its own 
destruction is a thing that we may at 
least hope for on the ground that it 
manages to survive. But under the rule 
of a standard Morality evolution is lim- 
ited by the fact that at a certain point 
of development the individual in whom 
the advance is manifested (say the 
Superman) is attacked and destroyed 
in the name of Right by the other less 
developed individuals; so that in effect 
the race does will its own destruction on 
the plane of the Superman. And the 
attack presents itself to these less de- 
veloped ones as an attack of right on 
might; for to the ordinary citizen right 
means thinking as he does; and the 
Superman who goes deeper than he into 
morals is just as much a rascal to him 
as the criminal who does not go so deep. 
It seems clear, therefore, that the only 
chance for the Superman is to acquire 

23s 



sufficient might to defy the efforts of 
the average respectable man to destroy 
him. Hitherto these attempts have not 
been successful on the physical plane. 
Napoleon's military system finally re- 
duced itself to absurdity, and forced the 
dufferdom of Europe to combine and 
destroy him. Caesar, with immense so- 
cial talents and moral gifts in addition 
to moral capacity, bribed the masses into 
tolerating him, but was killed by a con- 
spiracy of " good " men who killed him 
on principle as a protest of right against 
might. So much for the Superman of 
action ! As to the Superman who mere- 
ly writes and talks, he escapes because 
nobody understands him. " The tri- 
umph of his principles" means their 
degradation to the common level, the 
mob accepting his teaching just as a 
cannibal accepts the teaching of St. John 
or an Oxford undergraduate the philos- 
ophy of Plato or the poetry of Eu- 
ripides. The Nationalist, September, 
1903. 

236 



^ I ^HE soldier always begs to be al- MUitansm 

lowed to kill everybody who could 
possibly kill him In order that he may 
sheathe his sword for ever. And who 
shall blame him? But it is one thing 
not to blame a poor bedevilled, but logi- 
cal, military fellow-creature who pays 
with his skin for the murderous arro- 
gance of the fat citizens who skulk on 
their tight little island behind the guns 
of the fleet, clamoring for the blood of 
their neighbors. It is quite another to 
make his bedevilled logic the policy of 
your Empire. Civilization and the Sol- 
dier. The Humane Review, January 
1901, p. 309. 

No man who has learnt a short and ap- 
parently effectual way of disposing of 
political difficulties will ever have pa- 
tience to forego that method. Crom- 
well's way with Ireland, Napoleon's 
way with Europe, is finally every ca- 
pable soldier's way everywhere. A sol- 
dier has no other policy; and to make 
237 



him your counsellor Is to relinquish all 
choice of policy. Civilization and the 
Soldier. The Humane Review, Janu- 
ary 1901, p. 310. 

■1- 1- 

Miracies 'T'HAT definition of a miracle as " the 
•*' Divine Will overcoming the mere 
rule in things " is not bad. But surely 
the rule is that the Divine Will (my will 
and yours) can overcome everything 
finally, though It has to will pretty hard 
to do it, and overcomes nothing on the 
cheap, as your vulgar worshipper with 
his beggar's prayers would like to .be- 
lieve. The New Age, 7th January 
1909. 



Money 



ly^'ONEY is indeed the most Impor- 
tant thing in the world; and all 
sound and successful personal and na- 
tional morality should have this fact 
for its basis. Every teacher or twad- 
dler who denies it or suppresses It, is an 
enemy of life. Money controls moral- 
238 



Ity; and what makes the United States 
of America look so foolish even in fool- 
ish Europe is that they are always In a 
state of flurried concern and violent in- 
terference with morality, whereas they 
throw their money into the street to be 
scrambled for, and presently find that 
their cash reserves are not in their own 
hands, but In the pockets of a few mil- 
lionaires who, bewildered by their luck, 
and unspeakably incapable of making 
any truly economic use of it, endeavor 
to " do good " with It by letting them- 
selves be fleeced by philanthropic com- 
mittee men, building contractors, libra- 
rians and professors. In the name of 
education, science, art and what not; so 
that sensible people exhale relievedly 
when the pious millionaire dies, and his 
heirs, demoralized by being brought up 
on his outrageous Income, begin the so- 
cially beneficent work of scattering his 
fortune through the channels of the 
trades that flourish by riotous living. 
The Irrational Knot, p. xiv. 

239 



Money Is the most Important thing 
in the world. It represents health, 
strength, honor, generosity and beauty 
as conspicuously and undeniably as the 
want of It represents Illness, weakness, 
disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not 
the least of Its virtues Is that It destroys 
base people as certainly as It fortifies 
and dignifies noble people. It Is only 
when It Is cheapened to worthlessness 
for some, and made Impossibly dear to 
others, that It becomes a curse. In 
short, It is a curse only In such foolish 
social conditions that life itself is a 
curse. For the two things are Insepar- 
able : money is the counter that enables 
life to be distributed socially: It is life 
as truly as sovereigns and bank notes 
are money. The first duty of every citi- 
zen Is to Insist on having money on rea- 
sonable terms; and this demand is not 
coi .plied with by giving four men three 
shillings each for ten or twelve hours' 
drudgery and one man a thousand 
pounds for nothing. The crying need 
240 



of the nation Is not for better morals, 
cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, cul- 
ture, redemption of fallen sisters and 
erring brothers, nor the grace, love and 
fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for 
enough money. And the evil to be at- 
tacked Is not sin, suffering, greed, priest- 
craft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, 
Ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor 
any of the scapegoats which reformers 
sacrifice, but simply poverty. ( Major 
Barbara, p. 171. -^ 



'VT'OUR morals are only your habits: Morality 

do not call other people immoral 
because they have other habits. Cor- 
respondence. 

Morality means custom; and It is cus- 
tom that tyrannizes over most people's 
minds. Correspondence. 

The Irrational Knot Is one of those fic- 
tions In which the morality is original 
and not readymade. Now this quality 
241 



is the true diagnostic of the first order 
in literature and indeed in all the arts, 
including the art of life. It is, for ex- 
ample, the distinction that sets Shake- 
spear's Hamlet above his other plays, 
and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole 
above Shakespear's work as a whole. 
Shakespear's morality is a mere reach- 
me-down; and because Hamlet does not 
feel comfortable In it, and struggles 
against the misfit, he suggests something 
better, futile as his struggle is, and In- 
competent as Shakespear shews himself 
in his effort to think out the revolt of 
his feeling against readymade morality. 
Ibsen's morality is original all through; 
he knows well that the men in the street 
have no use for principles, because they 
can neither understand nor apply them; 
and that what they can understand and 
apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, 
often frightfully destructive and inhu- 
man, but at least definite rules enabling 
the common stupid man to know where 
he stands and what he may do and not 
242 



do, without getting Into trouble. Now 
to all writers of the first order, these 
rules, and the need for them produced 
by the moral and Intellectual Incompe- 
tence of the ordinary human animal, 
are no more Invariably beneficial and re- 
spectable than the sunlight which ripens 
the wheat in Sussex and leaves the des- 
ert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks 
of the ploughman's child rosy In the 
morning and striking the ploughman 
brainsick or dead In the afternoon; no 
more Inspired (and no less) than the 
religion of the Andaman Islanders; as 
much in need of frequent throwing 
away and replacement as the commu- 
nity's boots. By writers of the second 
order the readymade morality Is ac- 
cepted as the basis of all moral judg- 
ment and criticism of the characters 
they portray, even when their genius 
forces them to represent their most at- 
tractive heroes and heroines as violat- 
ing the readymade code In all directions. 
The Irrational Knot, pp. xxll., xxlli. 

243 



No man who shuts his eyes and opens 
his mouth when religion and morahty 
are offered to him on a long spoon can 
share the same Parnassian bench with 
those who make an original contribution 
to religion and morality, were it only a 
criticism. The Irrational Knot, p. xxiv. 

The statement that Ibsen's plays have 
an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in 
which it is used, quite true. Immo- 
rality does not necessarily imply mis- 
chievous conduct: it implies conduct, 
mischievous or not, which does not con- 
form to current ideals. Since Ibsen has 
devoted himself almost entirely to shew- 
ing that the spirit or will of Man is 
constantly outgrowing his ideals, and 
that therefore conformity to them is 
constantly producing results no less 
tragic than those which follow the vio- 
lation of ideals which are still vahd, the 
main effect of his plays is to keep before 
the public the importance of being al- 
244 



ways prepared to act Immorally, to re- 
mind men that they ought to be as 
careful how they yield to a temptation 
to tell the truth as to a temptation to 
hold their tongues, and to urge upon 
women that the desirability of their pre- 
serving their chastity depends just as 
much on circumstances as the desirabil- 
ity of taking a cab Instead of walking. 
He protests against the ordinary as- 
sumption that there are certain supreme 
ends which justify all means used to 
attain them; and insists that every end 
shall be challenged to show that It jus- 
tifies the means. Our Ideals, like the 
gods of old, are constantly demanding 
human sacrifices. Let none of them, 
says Ibsen, be placed above the obliga- 
tion to prove that they are worth the 
sacrifices they demand; and let every- 
one refuse to sacrifice himself and others 
from the moment he loses his faith In 
the reality of the ideal. Quintessence 
of Ibsenism, pp. 136, 137. 

245 



There can be no question as to the effect 
likely to be produced on an individual 
by his conversion from the ordinary ac- 
ceptance of current ideals as safe stand- 
ards of conduct, to the vigilant open- 
mindedness of Ibsen. It must at once 
greatly deepen his sense of moral re- 
sponsibility. Before conversion the in- 
dividual anticipates nothing worse in the 
way of examination at the judgment bar 
of his conscience than such questions as 
Have you kept the commandments? 
Have you obeyed the law? Have you 
attended church regularly? paid your 
rates and taxes to Caesar? and con- 
tributed, In reason, to charitable insti- 
tutions? It maybe hard to do all these 
things; but It is still harder not to do 
them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards 
in the hundred well know. And even a 
scoundrel can do them all and yet live 
a worse life than the smuggler or pros- 
titute who must answer No all through 
the catechism. Quintessence of Ibsen- 
ism, pp. 137, 138. 

246 



NAPOLEON. There are three sorts of 
people in the world, the low people, the 
middle people, and the high people. 
The low people and the high people are 
alike in one thing: they have no scruples, 
no morality. The low are beneath 
morality, the high above it. I am not 
afraid of either of them ; for the low are 
unscrupulous without knowledge, so 
that they make an idol of me; whilst the 
high are unscrupulous without purpose, 
so that they go down before my will. 
Look you : I shall go over all the mobs 
and all the courts of Europe as a plough 
goes over a field. It is the middle peo- 
ple who are dangerous : they have both 
knowledge and purpose. But they, too, 
have their weak point. They are full 
of scruples — chained hand and foot by 
their morality and respectability. The 
Man of Destiny, pp. 211, 212. 

\X7^HATEVER is contrary to estab- Morality 

lished manners and customs is im- censorships 
moral. An immoral act or doctrine is 

247 



not necessarily a sinful one : on the con- 
trary, every advance in thought and con- 
duct is by definition immoral until it has 
converted the majority. For this rea- 
son it is of the most enormous impor- 
tance that immorality should be pro- 
tected jealously against the attacks of 
those who have no standard except the 
standard of custom, and who regard 
any attack on custom — that is, on 
morals — as an attack on society, on re- 
ligion, and on virtue. 
A censor is never intentionally a protect- 
or of immorality. He always aims at 
the protection of morality. Now mo- 
rality is extremely valuable to society. 
It imposes conventional conduct on the 
great mass of persons who are incapable 
of original ethical judgment, and who 
would be quite lost if they were not in 
leading-strings devised by lawgivers, 
philosophers, prophets, and poets for 
their guidance. But morality is not de- 
pendent on censorship for protection. 
It is already powerfully fortified by the 
248 



magistracy and the whole body of law. 
Blasphemy, indecency, libel, treason, se- 
dition, obscenity, profanity, and all the 
other evils which a censorship is sup- 
posed to avert are punishable by the 
civil magistrate with all the severity of 
vehement prejudice. Morality has not 
only every engine that lawgivers can 
devise in full operation for its protec- 
tion, but also that enormous weight of 
public opinion enforced by social ostra- 
cism which is stronger than all the 
statutes. A censor pretending to protect 
morality is like a child pushing the cush- 
ions of a railway carriage to give itself 
the sensation of making the train travel 
at sixty miles an hour. It is immorality, 
not morality, that needs protection: it 
is morality, not immorality, that needs 
restraint; for morality, with all the dead 
weight of human inertia and superstition 
to hang on the back of the pioneer, and 
all the malice of vulgarity and preju- 
dice to threaten him, is responsible for 
many persecutions and many martyr- 

249 



Moral 
Passion 



doms. The Shewing-up of Blanco Pos- 
net, pp. 346, 347. 

TT'ANNER. The change that came to 
me at thirteen was the birth In me 
of moral passion; and I declare that ac- 
cording to my experience moral passion 
is the only real passion. 
ANN. All passions ought to be moral, 
Jack. 

TANNER. Ought! Do you think that 
anything Is strong enough to Impose 
oughts on a passion except a stronger 
passion still? 

ANN. Our moral sense controls pas- 
sion, Jack. Don't be stupid. 
TANNER. Our moral sense I And is 
that not a passion? Is the devil to 
have all the passions as well as all the 
good tunes? If It were not a passion 
— if It were not the mightiest of the pas- 
sions, all the other passions would 
sweep It away like a leaf before a hurri- 
cane. It Is the birth of that passion 
250 



that turns a child Into a man. Man 
and Superman, p. 35. 



WHY the bees should pamper their Mother- 
mothers whilst we pamper only 
our operatic prima donnas Is a question 
worth reflecting on. Our notion of 
treating a mother Is, not to Increase her 
supply of food, but to cut It off by for- 
bidding her to work In a factory for a 
month after her confinement. Every- 
thing that can make birth a misfortune 
to the parents as well as a danger to 
the mother Is conscientiously done. 
Man and Superman, p. 199. 



r\R. • turns up his nose at the Mothers 

^^ State. "Anything less like a t^t^^ 
mother than the State I find It hard to 
imagine." He may well say so. When 
the State left the children to the 
mothers, they got no schooling; they 
were sent out to work under inhuman 

251 



conditions underground and overground 
for atrociously long hours as soon as 
they were able to walk; they died of 
typhus fever In heaps; they grew up to 
be as wicked to their own children as 
their parents had been to them. State 
Socialism rescued them from the worst 
of that, and means to rescue them from 
all of It. I now publicly challenge Dr. 
to propose, If he dares, to with- 
draw the hand of the State and aban- 
don the children to their mothers as 
before. At present mothers cannot af- 
ford to take care of their children; and 
the State can. The Pall Mall Gazette, 
2nd December 1907. 



-HH- 



Municipai T ET US imagmc a city m which the 

Trading I j ^ ^ ,. ^ ^ j 

^^ poor rates, police rates and sani- 
tary rates are very low, and the children 
In the schools flourishing and of full 
weight, whilst all the public services of 
the city are municipalized and conducted 
without a farthing of profit, or even 
252 



with occasional deficits made up out of 
the rates. Suppose another city In 
which all the public services are In the 
hands of flourishing joint stock com- 
panies paying from 7 to 21 per cent, 
and in which the workhouses, the 
prisons, the hospitals, the sanitary In- 
spectors, the dislnfectors and strippers 
and cleansers are all as busy as the 
joint stock companies, whilst the schools 
are full of rickety children. According 
to the commercial test, the second town 
would be a triumphant proof of the 
prosperity brought by private enter- 
prise, and the first a dreadful example 
of the bankruptcy of municipal trade. 
But which town would a wise man 
rather pay rates in? The very share- 
holders of the companies in the second 
town would take care to live In the first. 
And what chance would a European 
State consisting of towns of the second 
type have In a struggle for survival with 
a State of the first? The Common 
Sense of Municipal Trading, p. 39. 

253 



Suppose the drink trade were debited 
with what it costs in disablement, in- 
efficiency, illness and crime, with all 
their depressing effects on industrial pro- 
ductivity, and with their direct cost in 
doctors, policemen, prisons, etc., etc., 
etc. ! Suppose at the same time the 
municipal highways and bridges ac- 
count were credited with the value of 
the time and wear and tear saved by 
them! It would at once appear that 
the roads and bridges pay for them- 
selves many times over, whilst the pleas- 
ures of drunkenness are costly beyond 
all reason,. The Common Sense of 
Municipal Trading, p. 19. 

If a municipality owned all the land 
within its jurisdiction, it would still have 
to make the occupiers, including its own 
departments, pay rent in proportion to 
the commercial or residential desirabil- 
ity of their holdings; but it could pool 
the total rent and establish a " moral 
minimum " of house accommodation at 

254 



a " fair rent *' on a perfectly sound 
economic basis. The Common Sense 
of Municipal Trading, p. 72. 
The sudden reintroductlon of competi- 
tion by a new departure — for example 
the tube railway suddenly upsetting the 
monopoly of the old underground in 
London — always brings down prices, a 
fact which proves that private enter- 
prise maintains the highest price that 
will pay instead of the lowest. This 
tendency is clearly an anti-social one. 
The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- 
ing, p. 52. ^ 

Now the all important difference be- 
tween the position of the commercial in- 
vestor and the ratepayer is that whilst 
the commercial investor has no respon- 
sibility for the laborers whom he em- 
ploys beyond paying them their wages 
whilst they are working for him, the 
ratepayer is responsible for their subsist- 
ence from the cradle to the grave. 
The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- 
ing, p. 20. 

25s 



Municipal Trading seems a very sim- 
ple matter of business. Yet It Is conceiv- 
able by a sensible man that the political 
struggle over It may come nearer to a 
civil war than any issue raised In Eng- 
land since the Reform Bill of 1832. 
The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- 
ing, p. I. 

Nationausm "T^OYLE. Hcs a Nationalist and a 
^^ Separatist. I'm a metallurgical 
chemist turned civil engineer. Now 
whatever else metallurgical chemistry 
may be, It's not national. It's Interna- 
tional. And my business and yours as 
civil engineers is to join countries, not 
to separate them. The one real po- 
litical conviction that our business has 
rubbed Into us Is that frontiers are hin- 
drances and flags confounded nuisances. 
John Bull's Other Island, p. 22. 

A healthy nation is as unconscious of Its 

nationality as a healthy man of his 

bones. But if you break a nation's na- 

256 



tlonality It will think of nothing else but 
getting It set again. It will listen to no 
reformer, to no philosopher, to no 
preacher, until the demand of the Na- 
tionalist Is granted. It will attend to 
no business, however vital, except the 
business of unification and liberation. 
John Bull's Other Island, Preface, p. 
xxxvi. 

The business of Socialism is the organi- 
zation of the highly evolved industrial 
communities now politically represented 
by the great Powers, and not this non- 
sensical shouting of the political woes 
of Poland, Ireland, and the Transvaal 
with their obsolete ideals, their obscur- 
antist religions, their communities of Ig- 
norant farmers or depressed laborers, 
and their unintelligent and bigoted indi- 
vidualism. Socialists are not in the 
habit of pitying Western Europe be- 
cause Napoleon conquered It, or Eng- 
land because Julius Caesar conquered It. 

Correspondence. 

^S7 



Nice 
People 



I am not myself an Englishman but an 
Irishman; and all my national prejudice 
Is anti-English. But one of the first 
things Socialism taught me was that na- 
tional prejudices are not politics. Cor- 
respondence. 

'T CANNOT understand why she Is 
so unlucky : she Is such a nice wom- 
an! ": that is the formula. As if peo- 
ple with any force in them ever were 
altogether nice! The Irrational Knot, 

p. xxiv. 

1 1 - 

TT is reserved for some great critic 
to give us a study of the psychology 
of the nineteenth century. Those of us 
who as adults saw It face to face In that 
last moiety of its days when one fierce 
hand after another — Marx's, Zola's, Ib- 
sen's, Strindberg's, Turgenlef's, Tol- 
stoy's — stripped its masks off and re- 
vealed it as, on the whole, perhaps the 
most villainous page of recorded human 
history, can also recall the strange con- 
258 



fidence with which it regarded itself as 
the very summit of civilization, and 
talked of the past as a cruel gloom that 
had been dispelled for ever by the rail- 
way and the electric telegraph. 
Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. viii. 



W 



HEN the popular tribune demands Not what 
" good words " from Coriolanus, but^Vhaf' 
he replies, " He that will give good for^xhem 
words to thee will flatter beneath abhor- 
ring"; and no great play can ever be 
written by a man who will allow the 
public to dictate to him. Even if the 
public really knew what it likes and what 
it dislikes — a consummation of wisdom 
which it is as far from as any child — 
the true master-dramatist would still 
give it, not what it likes, but what is 
good for it. The Saturday Review, 7th 
December 1895. 

It is true that the public consists largely 
of people who are incapable of fully ap- 

259 



predating the best sort of artistic work. 
It is even true that in every audience,* 
especially on first nights, there is an ap- 
preciable number of persons whose con- 
dition is such that — to turn Tennyson's 
shallow claptrap into a terrible truth — 
they needs must hate the highest when 
they see it. But why should we credit 
these unhappy persons with that attri- 
bute of the highest character, the power 
of liking what pleases them, of believ- 
ing in it, of standing by those who give 
it to them? For the most part they 
never enjoy anything; they are always 
craving for stimulants, whereas the es- 
sence of art is recreation; let their flat- 
terer slip, as he always does sooner or 
later, and they are at his throat merci- 
lessly before he can recover himself. 
But if you speak in their hearing as the 
great men speak (which is easy enough 
if you happen to be a great man), then 
you will find that their specialty is self- 
torture, and that they are always hank- 
ering, in spite of themselves, after their 
260 



I 



own boredom and bewilderment, driven, 
probably, by some sort of uneasy hope 
that Ibsen or Wagner or some other 
gigantic bore may exorcize the devils 
which rend them. The fact is, there is 
nothing the public despises so much as 
an attempt to please It. Torment Is Its 
natural element : it is only the saint who 
has any capacity for happiness. There 
is no greater mistake in theology than 
to suppose that it Is necessary to lock 
people into hell or out of heaven. You 
might as well suppose that It Is neces- 
sary to lock a professional tramp Into 
a public-house or out of a Monday pop- 
ular concert, on the ground that the con- 
cert Is the better and cheaper place of 
the two. The artist's rule must be 
Cromwell's: " Not what they want, but 
what Is good for them." That rule, 
carried out in a kindly and sociable way, 
Is the secret to success In the long run 
at the theatre as elsewhere. The Satur- 
day Review, 20th April 1895. 



261 



observa- ^pj^g philanthropist Is a parasite on 
misery. Man and Superman, p. 

21 I. 

Necessity, ever Ironical towards Folly. 
Three Plays for Puritans, p. xll. 

•hiSutions \^0U have made for yourself some- 
thing that you call a morality or a 
religion or what not. It doesnt fit the 
facts. Well, scrap It. Scrap It and get 
one that does fit. That is what Is 
wrong with the world at present. It 
scraps Its obsolete steam engines and 
dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prej- 
udices and Its old moralities and its old 
religions and its old political constitu- 
tions. Whats the result? In machin- 
ery It does very well ; but In morals and 
religion and politics It Is working at a 
loss that brings It nearer bankruptcy 
every year. Dont persist In that folly. 
If your old religion broke down yester- 
day, get a newer and a better one for 
to-morrow. Major Barbara, p. 297. 
262 



Enough, then, of this goose-cackle about 
Progress: Man, as he Is, never will nor 
can add a cubit to his stature by any 
of its quackeries, political, scientific, edu- 
cational, religious, or artistic. What Is 
likely to happen when this conviction 
gets Into the minds of the men whose 
present faith In these illusions Is the 
cement of our social system, can be Im- 
agined only by those who know how 
suddenly a civilization which has long 
ceased to think (or In the old phrase, to 
watch and pray) can fall to pieces when 
the vulgar belief In Its hypocrisies and 
Impostures can no longer hold out 
against Its failures and scandals. When 
religious and ethical formulae become so 
obsolete that no man of strong mind 
can believe them, they have also reached 
the point at which no man of high char- 
acter will profess them; and from that 
moment until they are formally dises- 
tablished, they stand at the door of 
every profession and every public office 
to keep out every able man who Is not 
263 



a sophist or a liar. A nation which re- 
vises Its parish councils once In three 
years, but will not revise Its articles 
of religion once In three hundred, even 
when those articles avowedly began as 
a political compromise, dictated by Mr. 
Faclng-Both-Ways, Is a nation that 
needs remaking. Man and Superman^ 
pp. 217, 218. 



Oscar 

Wilde's 



TN a certain sense Mr. Oscar Wilde is , 
Plays -*• to me our only thorough playwright. \ 
He plays with everything: with wit, 1 
with philosophy, with drama, with ac- j 
tors and audience, with the whole \ 
theatre. Such a feat scandalizes the j 
Englishman, who can no more play with ' 
wit and philosophy than he can with a > 
football or a cricket bat. He works at ^ 
both, and has the consolation, if he can- j 
not make people laugh, of being the: 
best cricketer and footballer in the ; 
world. Now it Is the mark of the art- ; 
1st that he will not work. Just as peo- 
ple with social ambitions will practise 
264 



the meanest economies In order to live 
expensively; so the artist will starve his 
way through Incredible toll and discour- 
agement sooner than go and earn a 
week's honest wages. Mr. Wilde, an 
arch-artist, Is so colossally lazy that he 
trifles even with the work by which an 
artist escapes work. He distils the very 
quintessence, and gets as product plays 
which are so unapproachably playful 
that they are the delight of every play- 
goer with twopenn'orth of brains. The 
English critic always protesting that the 
drama should not be didactic, and yet 
always complaining If the dramatist 
does not find sermons In stones and 
good In everything, will be conscious of 
a subtle and pervading levity In An Ideal 
Husband. All the literary dignity of 
the play, all the Imperturbable good 
sense and good manners with which Mr. 
Wilde makes his wit pleasant to his com- 
paratively stupid audience, cannot quite 
overcome the fact that Ireland Is of all 
countries the most foreign to England, 
265 



and that to the Irishman (and Mr. 
Wilde is almost as acutely Irish an Irish- 
man as the Iron Duke of Wellington) 
there is nothing in the world quite so 
exquisitely comic as an Englishman's 
seriousness. It becomes tragic, per- 
haps, when the Englishman acts on it; 
but that occurs too seldom to be taken 
into account, a fact which intensifies the 
humor of the situation, the total result 
being the Englishman utterly uncon- 
scious of his real self, Mr. Wilde keen- 
ly observant of it and playing on the 
self-unconsciousness with irresistible 
humor, and finally, of course, the Eng- 
lishman annoyed with himself for being 
amused at his own expense, and for be- 
ing unable to convict Mr. Wilde of 
what seems an obvious misunderstand- 
ing of human nature. He is shocked, 
too, at the danger to the foundations 
of society when seriousness is publicly 
laughed at. And to complete the odd- 
ity of the situation, Mr. Wilde, touch- 
ing what he himself reverences, is abso- 
266 



lutely the most sentimental dramatist of 
the day. The Saturday Review, I2th 
January 1895. 



HERE are EngHsh parasitic Indus- Parasitic 



T 

tries which are wholly bad — In 
which nearly all the work is done by 
lads and lasses who are not getting a 
living wage and are yet putting in a full 
day's work and eating more than an 
adult to keep themselves growing. 
Such Industries are really supported by 
the young people's parents. The young 
people's employers are sucking the blood 
of the industry which pays the parents' 
wages. That is what is at the bottom 
of the demand for a legal minimum 
wage for all workers in the country. 
Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. The Clerk, 
February 1908, p. 21. 



Trades 



I 



Passions 



F "the heart of man Is deceitful above The 
all things, and desperately wicked," 
then, truly, the man who allows himself 
267 



to be guided by his passions must needs 
be a scoundrel; and the teachers who 
advise such guidance might well be slain 
by his parents. But how If the youth 
thrown helpless on his passions found 
that honesty, that self-respect, that 
hatred of cruelty and Injustice, that the 
desire for soundness and health and 
efficiency were master passions: nay, 
that their excess Is so dangerous to 
youth that It Is part of the wisdom of 
age to say to the young: " Be not right- 
eous overmuch : why shouldst thou de- 
stroy thyself?" On the other hand, 
the people who profess to renounce and 
abjure their own passions, and ostenta- 
tiously regulate their conduct by the 
most convenient Interpretation of what 
the Bible means, or, worse still, by their 
ability to find reasons for It (as If there 
were not excellent reasons to be found 
for every conceivable course of conduct, 
from dynamiting and vivisection to 
martyrdom), seldom need a warning 
against being righteous overmuch, their 
268 



attention, Indeed, often needing a rather 
pressing jog In the opposite direction. 
Passion Is the steam In the engine of all 
religious and moral systems. In so 
far as It Is malevolent, the religions are 
malevolent too, and Insist on human 
sacrifices, on hell, wrath, and vengeance. 
The Sanity of Art, pp. 42, 44. 

IV/T ORELL. Man can climb to the The peace 
highest summits ; but he cannot pSSh au 
dwell there long. F^Si^g 

MARCHBANKS. It's false: there can he 
dwell for ever, and there only. It's In 
the other moments that he can find no 
rest, no sense of the silent glory of life. 
Where would you have me spend my 
moments, If not on the summits? 

Candida, p. 144. 

\X^HEN, In addressing an ordinary personal 

religious audience, I have occa- 
sion to speak of the force which they 
call the Will of God, and which I my- 
269 



self have called the Life Force, I use 
the term which is familiar and intelli- 
gible to them. The force in question is 
as obvious a reality to me as magnetism 
or gravitation; and I had very much 
rather be misunderstood as accepting 
some of its legendary associations than 
as denying or reckoning without its ex- 
istence. But as a matter of fact, my 
references to it are always accompanied 
by other observations which could not 
possibly be taken as proceeding from 
an ordinary Evangelical. I hope to de- 
fine my views on this subject more pre- 
cisely in a book entirely devoted to 
them; but should anything prevent me 
from accomplishing this design, the 
third Act of Man and Superman will 
remain on record as a statement of my 
creed. Correspondence. 

I am a moral revolutionary, interested, 
not in the class war, but in the struggle 
between human vitality and the artificial 
system of morality; and distinguishing, 

270 



not between capitalist and proletarian, 
but between moralist and natural histo- 
rian. Correspondence. 

For my own part, if I do not care to 
rhapsodize much about Mozart, it is 
because I am so violently prepossessed 
in his favor that I am capable of sup- 
plying any possible deficiency in his 
work by my imagination. Gounod has 
devoutly declared that Don Giovanni 
has been to him all his life a revelation 
of perfection, a miracle, a work without 
fault. I smile indulgently at Gounod, 
since I cannot afford to give myself 
away so generously (there being, no 
doubt, less of me) ; but I am afraid my 
fundamental attitude towards Mozart 
is the same as his. In my small boy- 
hood I by good luck had an opportunity 
of learning the Don thoroughly; and if 
it were only for the sense of the value 
of fine workmanship which I gained 
from it, I should still esteem that lesson 
the most important part of my edu- 
271 



cation. Indeed It educated me artis- 
tically in all sorts of ways, and disquali- 
fied me only in one — that of criticizing 
Mozart fairly. Everyone appears a 
sentimental, hysterical bungler in com- 
parison, when anything brings his finest 
work vividly back to me. The World, 
9th December 1891, p. 26. 

I have a professional reason for not 
drinking alcohol. The work I have to 
do depends for Its quality on a very keen 
self-criticism. Anything that makes me 
easily pleased with myself Instantly re- 
duces the quality of my work. Instead 
of following up and writing down about 
two per cent of the ideas that occur to 
me on any subject, I put down ten per 
cent or even more if I go to work under 
the comfortable and self-indulgent In- 
fluence of a narcotic. Character Sketch. 
The Review of Reviews, February 1908, 
pp. 145, 146. 

I have not eaten meat for twenty-seven 

years. The results are before the pub- 

272 



lie. Character Sketeh. The Review 
of Reviews, February 1908, p. 145. 

... a dwarf — a creature with energy Personal 
enough to make him strong of body and J^S*^®^' 
fierce of passion, but with a brutish nar- 
rowness of intelligence and selfishness 
of imagination: too stupid to see that 
his own welfare can only be compassed 
as part of the welfare of the world, too 
full of brute force not to grab vigor- 
ously at his own gain. Such dwarfs are 
quite common in London. The Perfect 
W agnerite , p. 8. 

npO make my readers realize what a The 
^ philosopher is, I can only say that p^"°^°p^«^ 
/ am a philosopher. If you ask incred- 
ulously, " How, then, are your articles 
so interesting? " I reply that there is 
nothing so interesting as philosophy, 
provided its materials are not spurious. 
For instance, take my own materials : 
humanity and the fine arts. Any stu- 
dious, timorously ambitious book-worm 

*73 



can run away from the world with a few 
shelvesful of history, essays, descrip- 
tions, and criticisms, and, having pieced 
an Illusory humanity and art out of the 
effects produced by his library on his Im- 
agination, build some silly systematlza- 
tlon of his worthless Ideas over the 
abyss of his own nescience. Such a 
philosopher is as dull and dry as you 
please : It Is he who brings his profession 
into disrepute, especially when he talks 
much about art, and so persuades peo- 
ple to read him. Without having 
looked at more than fifty pictures In his 
life, or made up his mind on the small- 
est point about one of the fifty, he will 
audaciously take It upon himself to ex- 
plain the development of painting from 
Zeuxis and Apelles to Raphael and 
Michael Angelo. As to the way he 
will go on about music, of which he al- 
ways has an awe-stricken conceit. It 
spoils my temper to think of It, espe- 
cially when one remembers that musical 
composition is taught (a monstrous 

274 



pretension) In this country by people 

who read scores, and never by any 

chance listen to performances. Now, 

the right way to go to work — strange 

as It may appear — Is to look at pictures 

until you have acquired the power of 

seeing them. If you look at several 

thousand good pictures every year, and 

form some sort of practical judgment 

about every one of them — were It only 

that It Is not worth troubling over — 

then at the end of five years or so you 

will. If you have a wise eye, be able to 

see what Is actually In a picture, and not 

what you think Is In It. Similarly, If 

you listen critically to music every day 

for a number of years, you will. If you 

have a wise ear, acquire the power of 

hearing music. And so on with all the 

jarts. When we come to humanity It Is 

I still the same: only by Intercourse with 

imen and women can we learn anything 

I about It. This Involves an active life, 

mot a contemplative one; for unless you 

I do something In the world, you can have 

27s 



no real business to transact with men; 
and unless you love and are loved, you 
can have no Intimate relations with 
them. And you must transact business, 
wirepull politics, discuss religion, give 
and receive hate, love and friendship 
with all sorts of people before you can 
acquire the sense of humanity. If you 
are to acquire the sense sufficiently to be 
a philosopher, you must do all these 
things unconditionally. You must not 
say that you will be a gentleman and 
limit your Intercourse to this class or 
that class; or that you will be a virtu- 
ous person and generalize about the af- 
fections from a single Instance — unless, 
Indeed, you have the rare happiness to 
stumble at first upon an all-enlightening 
Instance. You must have no convic- 
tions, because, as Nietzsche puts it,i 
" convictions are prisons." Thus, I 
blush to add, you cannot be a philoso- 
pher and a good man, though you may 
be a philosopher and a great one. You 
will say, perhaps, that If this be so, there 
276 



I 



should be no philosophers; and perhaps 
you are right; but though I make you 
this handsome concession, I do not de- 
fer to you to the extent of ceasing to 
exist. If you Insist on the hangman, 
whose pursuits are far from elevating, 
you may very well tolerate the philoso- 
pher, even If philosophy Involves phi- 
landering; or, to put It another way, If, 
In spite of your hangman, you tolerate 
murder within the sphere of war. It may 
b^ necessary to tolerate comparatively 
venial irregularities within the sphere 
of philosophy. It is the price of 
progress ; and, after all, it is the philos- 
opher, and not you, who will burn for It. 
The Saturday Review, i ith April 1896. 



T^ON JUAN. The philosopher is in Thepw- 
^7^ the grip of the^ Life Force. This fe'^"'^ 
Life Force says to him, " I have done a 
thousand wonderful things unconscious- 
ly by merely willing to live and follow- 
ing the line of least resistance: now I 
277 



want to know myself and my destina- 
tion, and choose my path; so I have 
made a special brain — a philosopher's 
brain — to grasp this knowledge for me 
as the husbandman's hand grasps the 
plough for me. And this," says the 
Life Force to the philosopher, '" must 
thou strive to do for me until thou diest, 
when I will make another brain and 
another philosopher to carry on the 
work." 

THE DEVIL. What is the use of kno)}^- 
ing? 

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose 
the line of greatest advantage instead 
of yielding in the direction of the least 
resistance. Does a ship sail to its des- 
tination no better than a log drifts 
nowhither? The philosopher is Na- 
ture's pilot. And there you have our 
difference: to be in hell is to drift; to be 
in heaven is to steer. Man and Super- 
man, p. 134. 



278 



"D UNYAN, Blake, Hogarth and Tur- The^^^ ^ 
"'■^ ner (these four apart and above all of ufe^ ^ 
the English classics), Goethe, Shelley, 
Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, 
Tolstoy and Nietzsche are among the 
writers whose peculiar sense of the 
world I recognize as more or less akin 
to my own. Mark the word peculiar. 
I read Dickens and Shakespear without 
shame or stint; but their pregnant ob- 
servations and demonstrations of life 
are not co-ordinated into any philoso- 
phy or religion: on the contrary, 
Dickens's sentimental assumptions are 
violently contradicted by his observa- 
tions; and Shakespear's pessimism is 
only his wounded humanity. Both have 
the specific genius of the fictionist and 
the common sympathies of human feel- 
ing and thought in pre-eminent degree 
. . . but they are concerned with the 
diversities of the world instead of with 
its unities. Man and Superman, pp. 
xxviii., xxix. 



279 



Life is a thing of which It Is Important 
to have a theory; vet most people take 
it for granted, and go on HvIng for no 
better reason than that they find them- 
selves alive. Life, Literature and Po- 
litical Economy. Clare Market Mag- 
azine, January 1906, p. 27. 

Ewno^ npHE players of the great game of 
°°™y X economics in future will have to be 
philosophers dealing with human con- 
duct and destiny in the largest sense, 
International as well as national. The 
field of the political economist will be 
life; and his instrument will be litera- 
ture. The prophet of the race will be 
a political economist. Life, Literature 
and Political Economy. Clare Market 
Review, January 1906, p. 32. 

Poverty ' I ^HE thoughtlcss wlckcdncss with 
which we scatter sentences of im- 
prisonment, torture in the solitary cell 
and on the plank bed, and flogging, on 

280 



moral Invalids and energetic rebels, Is 
as nothing compared to the stupid levity 
with which we tolerate poverty as If it 
were either a wholesome tonic for lazy 
people or else a virtue to be embraced 
as St. Francis embraced It. If a man Is 
Indolent, let him be poor. If he Is 
drunken, let him be poor. If he Is not 
a gentleman, let him be poor. If he Is 
addicted to the fine arts or to pure 
science instead of to trade and finance, 
let him be poor. If he chooses to spend 
his urban eighteen shillings a week or 
his agricultural thirteen shillings a week 
on his beer and his family instead of 
saving it up for his old age, let him be 
poor. Let nothing be done for '' the 
undeserving " : let him be poor. Serve 
him right ! Also — somewhat inconsist- 
ently — blessed are the poor! Major 
Barbara, p. i66. 

The man who cannot see that starva- 
tion, overwork, dirt, and disease are as 
immoral as prostitution — that they are 
281 



the vices and crimes of a nation, and not 
merely its misfortunes — is (to put it as 
politely as possible) a hopelessly Priv- 
ate Person. The Author's Apology. — 
Mrs. Warren's Profession, p. 54. 

. . . The irresistible natural truth 
which we all abhor and repudiate: to 
wit, that the greatest of evils and the 
worst of crimes is poverty, and that our 
first duty — a duty to which every other 
consideration should be sacrificed — is 
not to be poor. " Poor but honest," 
" the respectable poor," and such 
phrases are as intolerable and as im- 
moral as " drunken but amiable," 
" fraudulent but a good after-dinner 
speaker," " splendidly criminal," or the 
like. Security, the chief pretence of 
civilization, cannot exist where the 
worst of dangers, the danger of pov- 
erty, hangs over everybody's head. 

Major Barbara, p. 164. 

At present we say callously to each citi- 
zen: " If you want money, earn it," as 
282 



If his having or not having It were a 
matter that concerned himself alone. 
We do not even secure for him the op- 
portunity of earning It: on the contrary, 
we allow our Industry to be organized 
in open dependence on the maintenance 
of " a reserve army of unemployed " 
for the sake of " elasticity." The sen- 
sible course would be Cobden-Sander- 
son's : that Is, to give every man enough 
to live well on, so as to guarantee the 
community against the possibility of a 
case of the malignant disease of pov- 
erty, and then (necessarily) to see that 
he earned It. Major Barbara, p. 167. 

UNDERSHAFT. Cleanliness and respect- 
ablhty do not need justification, Bar- 
bara : they justify themselves. I see no 
darkness here, no dreadfulness. In 
your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, 
misery, cold and hunger. You gave 
them bread and treacle and dreams of 
heaven. I give from thirty shillings 
a week to twelve thousand a year. 
283 



They find their own dreams; but I look 
after the drainage. 

BARBARA. And their souls? 

UNDERSHAFT. I save their souls just 
as I saved yours. 

BARBARA [revolted] You saved my 
soul ! What do you mean? 

UNDERSHAFT. I fed you and clothed 
you and housed you. I took care that 
you should have money enough to live 
handsomely — more than enough; so 
that you could be wasteful, careless, 
generous. That saved your soul from 
the seven deadly sins. 

BARBARA [bewildered] The seven dead- 
ly sins ! 

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. 
[Counting on his fingers] Food, cloth- 
ing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and 
children. Nothing can lift those seven 
millstones from Man's neck but money; 
and the spirit cannot soar until the mill- 
stones are lifted. I lifted them from 
284 



your spirit. I enabled Barbara to be- 
come Major Barbara; and I saved her 
from the crime of poverty. 
cusiNS. Do you call poverty a crime? 
UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. 
All the other crimes are virtues beside 
it: all the other dishonors are chivalry 
itself by comparison. Poverty blights 
whole cities; spreads horrible pesti- 
lences; strikes dead the very souls of all 
who come in sight, sound or smell of it. 
What you call crime is nothing: a mur- 
der here and a theft there, a blow now 
and a curse then: what do they matter .f* 
they are only the accidents and illnesses 
of life: there are not fifty genuine pro- 
fessional criminals in London. But 
there are millions of poor people, ab- 
ject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill 
clothed people. They poison us mor- 
ally and physically: they kill the happi- 
ness of society: they force us to do away 
with our own liberties and to organize 
unnatural cruelties for fear they should 
rise against us and drag us down into 
28s 



their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we 
all fear poverty. Pah ! Major Bar- 
bara, pp. 298, 299. 



\nd^^ "DUT as, thanks to our political im- 
weaith -■-^ becility and personal cowardice 
(fruits of poverty, both), the best imi- 
tation of a good life now procurable is 
life on an independent income, all sen- 
sible people aim at securing such an in- 
come, and are, of course, careful to 
legalize and moralize both it and all 
the actions and sentiments which lead 
to it and support it as an institution. 
What else can they do? They know, 
of course, that they are rich because 
others are poor. But they cannot help 
that: it i^.-for the poor to repudiate pov- 
erty when they have had enough of it. 
The thing can be done easily enough: 
the demonstrations to the contrary 
made by the economists, jurists, moral- 
ists and sentimentalists hired by the 
rich to defend them, or even doing the 
286 



work gratuitously out of sheer folly and 
abjectness, impose only on the hirers. 
The reason why the independent income- 
tax payers are not solid in defence of 
their position is that the poverty of 
those we rob prevents our having the 
good life for which we sacrifice them. 
Rich men or aristocrats with a devel- 
oped sense of life — men like Ruskin and 
William Morris and Kropotkin — have 
enormous social appetites and very fas- 
tidious personal ones. They are not 
content with handsome houses: they 
want handsome cities. They are not 
content with bediamonded wives and 
blooming daughters: they complain be- 
cause the charwoman is badly dressed, 
because the laundress smells of gin, be- 
cause the sempstress is anemic, because 
every man they meet is not a friend and 
every woman not a romance. They 
turn up their noses at their neighbors' 
drains, and are made ill by the architec- 
ture of their neighbors' houses. Trade 
patterns made to suit vulgar people do 

287 



not please them (and they can get noth- 
ing else) : they cannot sleep nor sit at 
ease upon " slaughtered " cabinet- 
makers' furniture. The very air is not 
good enough for them: there is too 
much factory smoke in it. They even 
demand abstract conditions: justice, 
honor, a noble moral atmosphere, a 
mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. 
Finally they declare that though Frois- 
sart's Knight who " saw that to rob and 
pill was a good life " may have been 
right, because he did it with his own 
hand on horseback and in a steel coat, 
to rob and pill by the hands of the po- 
liceman, the bailiff, and the soldier, and 
to underpay them meanly for doing it, 
is not a good life, but rather fatal to 
all possibility of even a tolerable one. 
They call on the poor to revolt, and, 
finding the poor shocked at their un- 
gentlemanliness, despairingly revile the 
proletariat for its " damned wantless- 
ness " {verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit). 
Major Barbara, ^^. i68, 169, 170. 
288 



I, always on the heroic plane Imagin- 
atively, had two disgusting faults which 
I did not recognize as faults because I 
could not help them. I was poor and 
shabby. I therefore tolerated the gross 
error that poverty, though an Incon- 
venience and a trial, Is not a sin and a 
disgrace; and I stood for my self-re- 
spect on the things I had: probity, abil- 
ity, knowledge of art, laboriousness, 
and whatever else came cheaply to me. 
Because I could walk Into Hampton 
Court Palace and the National Gallery 
(on free days) and enjoy Mantegna 
and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires 
were yawning miserably over Inept 
gluttonies; because I could suffer more 
by hearing a movement of Beethoven's 
Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong 
tempo than a duchess by losing a dia- 
mond necklace, I was Indifferent to the 
repulsive fact that If I had fallen In 
love with the duchess I did not possess 
a morning suit in which I could reason- 
ably have expected her to touch me with 
289 



the furthest protended pair of tongs; 
and I did not see that to remedy this I 
should have been prepared to wade 
through seas of other people's blood. 
Indeed It Is this perception which con- 
stitutes an aristocracy nowadays. It Is 
the secret of all our governing classes, 
which consist finally of people who, 
though perfectly prepared to be gener- 
ous, humane, cultured, philanthropic, 
public spirited and personally charming 
In the second Instance, are unalterably 
resolved, In the first, to have money 
enough for a handsome and delicate life, 
and will, in pursuit of that money, batter 
In the doors of their fellow-men, sell 
them up, sweat them In fetid dens, shoot, 
stab, hang. Imprison, sink, burn and de- 
stroy them In the name of law and order. 
And this shews their fundamental sanity 
and rightmindedness; for a sufficient in- 
come is Indispensable to the practice of 
virtue; and the man who will let any un- 
selfish consideration stand between him 
and its attainment Is a weakling, a dupe, 
290 



and a predestined slave. If I could 
convince our impecunious mobs of this, 
the world would be reformed before the 
fend of the week; for the sluggards who 
!are content to be wealthy without work- 
ing and the dastards who are content to 
work without being wealthy, together 
with all the pseudo-moralists and ethi- 
cists and cowardice mongers generally, 
would be exterminated without shrift, 
to the unutterable enlargement of life 
and ennoblement of humanity. We 
imight even make some beginnings of 
civilization under such happy circum- 
stances. The Irrational Knot, pp. 
xviii., xix. 

The instinct which has led the British 
peerage to fortify Itself by American al- 
liances Is healthy and well Inspired. 
Thanks to it, we shall still have a few 
people to maintain the tradition of a 
piandsome, free, proud, costly life, whilst 
'the craven mass of us are keeping up 
our starveling pretence that It is more 
291 



Prayer 



Important to be good than to be rich, 
and piously cheating, robbing, and mur- 
dering one another by doing our duty 
as policemen, soldiers, balllfifs, jurymen, 
turnkeys, hangmen, tradesmen, and cu- 
rates, at the command of those who 
know that the golden grapes are not 
sour. Why, good heavens ! we shall 
all pretend that this straightforward 
truth of mine Is mere Swiftlan satire, 
because It would require a little courage 
to take it seriously and either act on it 
or make me drink the hemlock for ut- 
tering it. The Irrational Knot^ pp. 
xlx., XX. 

T ORD SUMMERHAYS. Do you 

"^ not pray as common people do? 

LiNA. Common people do not pray, 

my lord : they only beg. 

Lord Summerhays. You never ask 

for anything? 

LiNA. No. 

Misalliance (unpublished, 19 12). 

■ t-i - 

292 



WHEN we succeed in adjusting our The 
. 1 ^ ^ • / ^ Problem 

social structure in such a way as piay 

to enable us to solve social questions as 
fast as they become really pressing, they 
will no longer force their way Into the 
theatre. Had Ibsen, for Instance, had 
any reason to believe that the abuses to 
which he called attention In his prose 
plays would have been adequately at- 
tended to without his interference, he 
would no doubt have gladly left them 
alone. The same exigency drove Wil- 
liam Morris In England from his tapes- 
tries, his epics, and his masterpieces of 
printing, to try and bring his fellow citi- 
zens to their senses by the summary 
process of shouting at them In the streets 
and in Trafalgar Square. John Rus- 
kln's writing began with Modern Paint- 
ers; Carlyle began with literary studies 
of German culture and the like: both 
were driven to become revolutionary 
pamphleteers. If people are rotting and 
starving In all directions, and nobody 
else has the heart or brains to make a 

293 



disturbance about It, the great writers 
must. The Problem Play. 

The Humanitarian, May 1895. 



-HH- 



Pro- npHIS Is a miserably Incompetent 
fessionai X world. The average doctor is a 
walking compound of natural ignorance 
and acquired witchcraft, who kills your 
favourite child, wreck's your wife's 
health, and orders you into habits of 
nervous dram-drinking before you have 
the courage to send him about his busi- 
ness, and take your chance like a gentle- 
man. The average lawyer is a nincom- 
poop, who contradicts your perfectly 
sound impressions on notorious points 
of law, involves you in litigation when 
your case is hopeless, compromises when 
your success Is certain, and cannot even 
make your will without securing the ut- 
ter defeat of your intention if any one 
takes the trouble to dispute them. And 
so on, down to the bootmaker whose 
boots you have to make your tortured 

294 



feet fit, and the tailor who clothes you 
as if you were a cast-iron hot-water ap- 
paratus. You imagine that these people 
have professions; and you find that 
what they have is only, in the correct 
old world, their " mystery "—a hum- 
bug, like all mysteries. And yet, how 
we help to keep up the humbug! 
The Saturday Review, i6th May 1896. 

What is called professional work Is, In 
point of severity, just what you choose 
to. make it, either commonplace, easy, 
and requiring only ^.vtensive industry to 
be lucrative, or else distinguished, diffi- 
cult, and exacting the fiercest fwtensive 
industry In return, after a probation of 
twenty years or so, for authority, repu- 
tation and an Income only sufficient for 
simple habits and plain living. The 
whole professional world lies between 
these two extremes. 

On Going to Church. 
The Savoy, January 1896, p. 16. 



29s 



Progress 'T'HE morc Ignorant men are, the more 
convinced are they that their Httle 
parish and their little chapel is an apex 
to which civilization and philosophy 
have painfully struggled up the pyramid 
of time from a desert of savagery. Sav- 
agery, they think, became barbarism; 
barbarism became ancient civilization; 
ancient civilization became Pauline 
Christianity; Pauline Christianity be- 
came Roman Catholicism; Roman Ca- 
tholicism became the Dark Ages; and 
the Dark Ages were finally enlightened 
by the Protestant instincts of the Eng- 
lish race. The whole process is summed 
up as Progress with a capital P. And 
any elderly gentleman of Progressive 
temperament will testify that the Im- 
provement since he was a boy Is enor- 
mous. 

Three Plays for Puritans] p. 199. 

Steam locomotion Is possible without a 

nation of Stephensons, although national 

Christianity is impossible without a na- 

296 



tlon of Chrlsts. But does any man seri- 
ously believe that the chauffeur who 
drives a motor car from Paris to Ber- 
lin Is a more highly evolved man than 
the charioteer of Achilles, or that a mod- 
ern Prime Minister Is a more enlight- 
ened ruler than Caesar because he rides 
a tricycle, writes his dispatches by the 
electric light, and Instructs his stock- 
broker through the telephone. 

Man and Superman^ p. 217. 

The point to seize Is that social progress 
takes effect through the replacement of 
old Institutions by new ones; and since 
every Institution Involves the recognition 
of the duty of conforming to It, progress 
must Involve the repudiation of an es- 
tablished duty at every step. If the 
Englishman had not repudiated the duty 
of absolute obedience to his king, his 
political progress would have been Im- 
possible. If women had not repudiated 
the duty of absolute submission to their 
husbands, and defied public opinion as 
297 

I 



to the limits set by modesty to their edu- 
cation, they would never have gained the 
protection of the Married Women's 
Property Act or the power to qualify 
themselves as medical practitioners. If 
Luther had not trampled on his duty to 
the head of his Church and on his vow 
of chastity, our priests would still have 
to choose between celibacy and prof- 
ligacy. There Is nothing new, then, in 
the defiance of duty by the reformer: 
every step of progress means a duty re- 
pudiated, and a scripture torn up. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 7, 8. 

History, as far as we are capable of his- 
tory (which is not saying much as yet), 
shews that all changes from crudity of 
social organization to complexity, and 
from mechanical agencies in government 
to living ones, seem anarchic at first 
sight. No doubt it is natural to a snail 
to think that any evolution which threat- 
ens to do away with shells will result 
in general death from exposure. Never- 
298 



theless, the most elaborately housed be- 
ings today are born not only without 
houses on their backs but without even 
fur or feathers to clothe them. 

The Perfect Wagnerite, p. 77. 

Even if man's Increased command over 
Nature included any Increased command 
over himself (the only sort of command 
relevant to his evolution Into a higher 
being) , the fact remains that it Is only by 
running away from the Increased com- 
mand over Nature to country places 
where Nature Is still In primitive com- 
mand over Man that he can recover 
from the effects of the smoke, the stench, 
the foul air, the overcrowding, the 
racket, the ugliness, the dirt which our 
civilization costs us. If manufacturing 
activity means Progress, the town must 
be more advanced than the country; and 
the field laborers and village artisans of 
today must be much less changed from 
the servants of Job than the proletariat 
of modern London from the proletariat 
299 



of Caesar's Rome. Yet the cockney pro- 
letarian is so inferior to the village 
laborer that it is only by steady recruit- 
ing from the country that London is 
kept alive. Three Plays for Puritans, 

pp. 201, 202. 

Unfortunately, human enlightenment 
does not progress by nicer and nicer ad- 
justments, but by violent corrective re- 
actions which invariably send us clean 
over our saddle and would bring us to 
the ground on the other side if the next 
reaction did not send us back again with 
equally excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism 
and Constitutionalism send us one way, 
Protestantism and Anarchism the other; 
Order rescues us from confusion and 
lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves 
the situation and is presently found to be 
as great a nuisance as Despotism. A 
scientifically balanced application of these 
forces, theoretically possible, is practi- 
cally incompatible with human passion. 
The Perfect JVagnerite, pp. 68, 69. 
300 



'T'HERE Is no magic In the ordeal of pj^Uc 
"^ popular election to change narrow 
minds into wide ones, cowards into com- 
manders, private ambition into civic 
patriotism, or crankiness into common 
sense. But still less is there any tendency 
to reverse the operation; for the nar- 
rowest fool, the vulgarest adventurer, 
the most impossible fanatic, gets socially 
educated by public life and committee 
work to an extent never reached in pri- 
vate life, or even in private commerce. 
The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- 
ing, p. 5. ^^ 

PUNCH and Tudy, the eternal rogue's Punch 
J ^ ^- ^1 u • A and J"<iy 

comedy temptmg the busmess dra- 
matist by its assured popularity, and 
fascinating the artist dramatist by Its 
unlimited depth, which yet Involves no 
obligation to fully fathom it or else fail. 
Success is safe at any depth, from an inch 
downwards. At the street corner, with 
a deplorable Judy, an infant thrown out 
of the window, a dog Toby, and a few 
301 



assorted types of law and order culmi- 
nating in a hangman and a devil, the 
great issues of the comedy can be ri- 
baldly touched to the music of pipes and 
drum. At the other end of the range, 
Mozart's Don Giovanni, the world's 
masterpiece in stage art, is only Punch 
on a higher plane. Every brace of vaga- 
bonds can master and perform the one; 
the greatest artists in the world can, at 
their best, only bungle through the other. 
Between the two lies all philosophic 
comedy, high and low, with its Faus- 
tuses, its Robert Macaires, its Affable 
Hawks, its Jeremy Diddlers, its common 
Joeys with red-hot poker and sausages, 
and its Pierrots. The Saturday Review, 
25th April 1896. 

\ STATE which is too humane to 
'^ punish will also be too thrifty to 
waste the life of honest men in watching 
or restraining dishonest ones. That is 
why we do not imprison dogs. We even 
take our chance of their first bite. But if 
302 



a dog delights to bark and bite. It goes to 
the lethal chamber. That seems to me 
sensible. To allow the dog to expiate his 
bite by a period of torment, and then 
let him loose in a much more savage con- 
dition (for the chain makes a dog sav- 
age) to bite again and expiate again, 
having meanwhile spent a great deal of 
human life and happiness in the task of 
chaining and feeding and tormenting 
him, seems to me idiotic and supersti- 
tious. Yet that is what we do to men 
who bark and bite and steal. It would 
be far more sensible to put up with their 
vices, as we put with their illnesses, un- 
til they give more trouble than they are 
worth, at which point we should, with 
many apologies and expressions of sym- 
pathy, and some generosity in complying 
with last wishes, place them In the lethal 
chamber and get rid of them. Under no 
circumstances should they be allowed to 
expiate their misdeeds by a manufac- 
tured penalty, to subscribe to a charity, 
or to compensate the victims. If there 

303 



Is to be no punishment there can be no 
forgiveness. We shall never have a real 
moral responsibility until everyone knows 
that his deeds are irrevocable, and that 
his life depends on his usefulness. 
Hitherto, alas ! humanity has never 
dared face these hard facts. We franti- 
cally scatter conscience money and In- 
vent systems of conscience banking, with 
expiatory penalties, atonements, redemp- 
tions, salvations, hospital subscription 
lists and what not, to enable us to con- 
tract-out of the moral code. Not con- 
tent with the old scapegoat and sacrifi- 
cial lamb, we deify human saviors, and 
pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. 
We attribute mercy to the Inexorable ; 
soothe our consciences after committing 
murder by throwing ourselves on the 
bosom of divine love ; and shrink even 
from our own gallows because we are 
forced to admit that it, at least, is Irre- 
vocable — as if one hour of Imprison- 
ment were not as irrevocable as any exe- 
cution ! Major Barbara, pp. 198, 199. 

304 



A LL human progress involves, as its The Pure 
'^ first condition, the wiUingness of 
the pioneer to make a fool of himself. 
The sensible man is the man who adapts 
himself to existing conditions. The fool 
is the man who persists in trying to adapt 
the conditions to himself. Both ex- 
tremes have their disadvantages. Too 
much sense is apt to end in knavery, and 
too much folly in martyrdom. I cling 
to my waning folly as a corrective to my 
waxing good sense as anxiously as I once 
nursed my good sense to defend myself 
against my folly. A young poet always 
starts with an infinitely wise hero : an old 
one — Richard Wagner, for example — 
ends with a " pure fool." Socialism at 
the International Congress. 

Cosmopolis, September 1896, p. 658. 

\X7'HEN I was young, the banquets on Real 
the stage were made by the prop- ^^^^ 
erty man: his goblets and pasties, and 
epergnes laden with grapes, regaled 
guests who walked off and on through 

30s 



illusory walnscotting simulated by the 
precarious perspective of the wings. 
The scene-painter built the rooms; the 
costumier made the dresses; the armour 
was made apparently by dipping the legs 
of the knights in a solution of salt of 
spangles and precipitating the metal on 
their calves by some electro-process; the 
leader of the band made the music; and 
the author wrote the verse and Invented 
the law, the morals, the religion, the art, 
the jurisprudence, and whatever else 
might be needed in the abstract depart- 
ment of the play. Since then we have 
seen great changes. Real walls, ceilings, 
and doors are made by real carpenters; 
real tailors and dressmakers clothe the 
performers; real armourers harness 
them; and real musicians write the music 
and have it performed with full orches- 
tral honors at the Crystal Palace and the 
Philharmonic. All that remains Is to get 
a real poet to write the verse, a real 
philosopher to do the morals, a real di- 
vine to put in the religion, a real lawyer 
306 



to adjust the law, and a real painter to 
design the pictorial effects. The Satur- 
day Review, 19th January 1895. 



npHE reasonable man adapts himself Reason 

to the world: the unreasonable one 
persists in trying to adapt the world to 
himself. Therefore all progress depends 
on the unreasonable man. 

Man and Superman, p. 238. 

The man who listens to Reason is lost: 
Reason enslaves all whose minds are not 
strong enough to master her. 
I Man and Superman, p. 238. 



T) OME, that has achieved greatness 
^^ only to learn how greatness de- 
stroys nations of men who are not great ! 
Casar and Cleopatra, p. 178. 

What will win in the race for Empire is 
the courage to look realities in the face 
and the energy to adapt social organiza- 

307 



Reflections 



tlon to the needs of the modern con- 
science, and so substitute a fruitful life 
for a fool's paradise. In what part of 
the British Empire these qualities are to 
be found at present (if in any) I know 
not : I have certainly not observed them 
lately in England. Civilization and the 
Soldier. The Humane Review^ January 
1901, p. 312. 

In a few centuries the Ionian sea will 
still laugh in the southern sun; and on 
its bosom, gently heaving, the shadows 
of airships (of Chinese manufacture, run 
by International Federations as State 
lines) will flit towards the whitecliffed 
island where a once famous nation will 
live by letting lodgings. Civilization 
and the Soldier. The Humane Review, 
January 1 901, p. 314. 

c^SAR. Might not the gods destroy the 
world if their only thought were to be 
at peace next year? 

Casar and Cleopatra, p. 134. 

308 



. . . that secret of heroism, never to 
let your hfe be shaped by fear of Its 
end. The Perfect Wagnerite^ p. 92. 

There are no moments In Hfe more tragic 
than those in which the humble common 
man, the manual worker, leaving with 
Implicit trust all high affairs to his bet- 
ters, and reverencing them wholly as 
worthy of that trust, even to the extent 
of accepting as his rightful function the 
saving of them from all roughening and 
coarsening drudgeries, first discovers 
that they are corrupt, greedy, unjust 
and treacherous. 

The Perfect JVagnerite^ P- 15- 
Our deepest convictions are on a plane 
where sectarian distinctions have no Im- 
portance, and where matters on which 
no Influential sect has yet dared to utter 
a sincere opinion are of very great Im- 
portance Indeed. 

The Daily News, 25th August 1902. 

T have always despised Adam because he 
had to be tempted by the woman, as she 

309 



was by the serpent, before he could be 
induced to pluck the apple from the tree 
of knowledge. I should have swallowed 
every apple on the tree the moment the 
owner's back was turned. 

The Doctor's Dilemma, p. xxxix. 

The most pitiful sort of ignorance is ig- 
norance of the few great men who are 
men of our own time. Most of us die 
without having heard of those contem- 
poraries of ours for our opportunities of 
seeing and applauding whom posterity 
will envy us. Imagine meeting the ghost 
of an Elizabethan cockney in heaven, 
and, on asking him eagerly what Shake- 
spear was like, being told either that the 
cockney had never heard of Shakespear, 
or knew of him vaguely as an objection- 
able writer of plays full of regrettable 
errors of taste. 

Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. liv. 

Without passion no man can be good or 
bad: he can at most be harmless or mis- 
chievous; and in either case he is the 

310 



genuine fool of Scripture. Christian 
Commonwealth^ 20th July 19 10. 

The Radicals who used to advocate, as 
an indispensable preliminary to social 
reform, the strangling of the last king 
with the entrails of the last priest, sub- 
stituted compulsory vaccination for com- 
pulsory baptism without a murmur. 

The Doctor's Dilemma, p. xv. 

Man is the only animal of which I am 
thoroughly and cravenly afraid. I have 
never thought much of the courage of 
a lion-tamer. Inside the cage he Is at 
least safe from other men. There is 
not much harm In a lion. He has no 
ideals, no religion, no politics, no chiv- 
alry, no gentility: in short, no reason 
for destroying anything that he does not 
want to eat. In the Days of my Youth. 
M.A.P., 17th September 1898, p. 324. 

Any place where men dwell, village or 

city, is a reflection of the consciousness of 

every single man. On Going to Church. 

The Savoy, ]2irm2ivy 1896, p. 17. 

311 



LADY CICELY. Men are always think- 
ing that they are going to do something 
grandly wicked to their enemies; but 
when it comes to the point, really bad 
men are just as rare as really good ones. 
Captain Brassbound's Conversion, 
p. 254. 

DOYLE. Live In contact with dreams 
and you will get something of their 
charm : live In contact with facts and 
you will get something of their brutal- 
ity. I wish I could find a country to 
live in where the facts were not brutal 
and the dreams not unreal. John Builds 
Other Island, p. 28. 



Religion 
on 



tie" JT Is said that '' some things " are too 
stage -■- sacred to be represented on the stage. 
The phrase '' some things " Is highly 
characteristic: it recalls the Intelligent 
member of Parliament who supported 
the attempt to exclude the late Charles 
Bradlaugh from the House of Com- 
mons on the ground that " a man ought 



312 



to believe In something or another." 
But since it is just as well not to be friv- 
olously vague in speaking of sacred 
things, let us replace " some things " by 
the mysteries of religion, which is what 
the objectors would mean if, on this 
subject, they were earnest enough to 
mean anything at all. Pray what are 
the mysteries of religion? Are they 
faith, hope, love, heroism, life, creation; 
or are they pews and pulpits, prayer- 
books and Sunday bonnets, copes and 
stoles and dalmatics? Even that large 
section of the population of these isl- 
ands whose religion Is the merest Idola- 
try of material symbols will not deny 
that the former are the realities of re- 
ligion. Then I ask the gentlemen who 
think that the pews and prayer-books 
are too sacred to be represented on the 
stage, why It Is that they have never 
protested against the fact that all our 
dramas deal with faith, hope, love, and 
the rest of the essentials? . . . The ob- 
jection made to Mr. Jones's play 

313 



(Michael and his Lost Angel) is really 
an objection to Michael's treatment of 
religion as co-extensive with Hfe: that 
is, as genuinely catholic. To the man 
who regards religion as only a water- 
tight Sunday compartment of social ob- 
servance, such a view is not only incon- 
venient but positively terrifying. I am 
sorry for him; but I can assure him that 
the British drama is annexing steadily 
the territory on which he feels so un- 
comfortable. And whoever tries to 
obstruct that advance will be inevitably 
ground into the mud. When I want 
to exhibit the might of criticism, I may 
throw an express train off the line; but 
you do not catch me trying to stop the 
Imperceptibly slow march of a glacier. 
The Saturday Review, 25th January 

1896. 

■ I - 1 - 

ReHgions ^O tolcratcd Church nor Salvation 
Poverty -»- ^ Army can ever win the entire con- 
fidence of the poor. It must be on the 
side of the police and the military, no 

314 



matter what It believes or disbelieves; 
and as the police and the military are 
the instruments by which the rich rob 
and oppress the poor (on legal and 
moral principles made for the purpose), 
it is not possible to be on the side of the 
poor and of the police at the same time. 
Indeed the religious bodies, as the al- 
moners of the rich, become a sort of 
auxiliary police, taking off the insurrec- 
tionary edge of poverty with coals and 
blankets, bread and treacle, and sooth- 
ing and cheering the victims with hopes 
of immense and inexpensive happiness 
in another world when the process of 
working them to premature death in 
the service of the rich is complete in this. 
Major Barbara, pp. 189, 190. 

\X7'HEN I became active in the Social- Remuner- 

Ist movement, and people tried to ^^^°^ 
pose me with the usual objections about 
Inequality of work requiring inequality 
of pay, and so forth, I had no difficulty 
in assuring them from my own experl- 

315 



ence, and from the clue it had given me 
to the rest of the world, that, other 
things being equal, the higher the work 
the less people would do It for. Ber- 
nard Shaw as a Clerk. The Clerk, Jan- 
uary 1908, p. 8. 

At present those who do the hard work 
are the worst paid, those whose work Is 
easy are better remunerated, whilst 
those who do nothing receive most. 
Pearson's Weekly, 12th January 1905. 

The man who pretends that the distri- 
bution of Income In this country reflects 
the distribution of ability or character 
Is an ignoramus. The man who says 
that it could by any possible political 
device be made to do so Is an unpracti- 
cal visionary. But the man who says 
that it ought to do so is something worse 
than an Ignoramus and more disastrous 
than a visionary: he Is, in the profound- 
est Scriptural sense of the word, a fool. 
Socialism and Superior Brains, p. 9. 



316 



"^'APOLEON gained the command Rent of 
"^ of the French army because he was ' ^ 
the ablest general in France. But sup- 
pose every individual in the French 
army had been a Napoleon also ! None 
the less a commander-in-chief, with his 
whole hierarchy of subalterns, would 
have had to be appointed — by lot if you 
like — and here, again, from the moment 
the lot was cast, the particular Napo- 
leon who drew the straw for command- 
er-in-chief would have been the great, 
the all-powerful Napoleon, much more 
able than the Napoleons who were cor- 
porals and privates. After a year, the 
difference in ability between the men 
who had been doing nothing but sentry 
duty, under no strain of responsibility, 
and the man who had been commanding 
the army would have been enormous. 
As " the defenders of the system of 
Conservatism " well know, we have for 
centuries made able men out of ordinary 
ones by allowing them to inherit excep- 
tional power and status; and the success 

317 



of the plan In the phase of social devel- 
opment to which It was proper was due 
to the fact that, provided only the fa- 
vored man were really an ordinary man, 
and not a duffer, the extraordinary 
power conferred on him did effectually 
create extraordinary ability as compared 
with that of an agricultural laborer, for 
example, of equal natural endowments. 
The gentleman, the lord, the king, all 
discharging social functions of which the 
laborer Is Incapable, are products as 
artificial as queen bees. Their supe- 
riority is produced by giving them a 
superior status, just as the inferiority 
of the laborer Is produced by giving him 
an inferior status. But the superior in- 
come which is the appanage of superior 
status Is not rent of ability. It is a pay- 
ment made to a man to exercise normal 
ability In an abnormal situation. Rent 
of ability is what a man gets by exercis- 
ing abnormal ability in a normal situa- 
tion. Socialism and Superior Brains, 
PP- 36, 37» 38. 

318 



"pORGIVENESS, absolution, atone- Reparation 

*■ ment, are figments: punishment Is 

only a pretence of cancelling one crime 

by another; and you can no more have 

forgiveness without vindlctlveness than 

you can have a cure without a disease. 

You will never get a high morality from 

people who conceive that their misdeeds 

are revocable and pardonable, or In a 

society where absolution and expiation 

are officially provided for us all. 

Major Barbara, p. 182. 

T HATE to think that Shakespear has Reputations 

lasted 300 years, though he got no 
further than Koheleth the Preacher, 
who died many centuries before him; 
or that Plato, more than 2,000 years 
old, is still ahead of our voters. We 
must hurry on: we must get rid of rep- 
utations : they are weeds In the soil of 
ignorance. Cultivate that soil, and 
they will flower more beautifully, but 
only as annuals. Three Plays for Puri- 
tans, p. xxxvii. 

319 



Resentment pOTHINUS [astonished] Then you 
do not resent treachery? 
C^SAR. Resent ! O thou foolish 
Egyptian, what have I to do with re- 
sentment? Do I resent the wind when 
It chills me, or the night when It makes 
me stumble In the darkness? Shall I 
resent youth when It turns from age, 
and ambition when It turns from servi- 
tude? Casar and Cleopatra, p. 174. 

Retaliation /^^SAR. Do you hear? These 
knockers at your gates are also be- 
lievers In vengeance and In stabbing. 
You have slain their leader: It Is right 
that they shall slay you. If you doubt 
It, ask your four counsellors here. And 
then In the name of that right [he em- 
phasizes the word with great scorni 
shall I not slay them for murdering their 
Queen, and be slain In my turn by their 
countrymen as the Invader of their 
fatherland? Can Rome do less than 
slay these slayers, too, to shew the world 
how Rome avenges her sons and her 
320 



honor. And so, to the end of history, 
murder shall breed murder, always In 
the name of right and honor and peace, 
until the gods are tired of blood and 
create a race that can understand. 

Casar and Cleopatra, p. 184. 

It Is exceedingly difficult to make people 
realize that an evil is an evil. For In- 
stance, we seize a man and deliberately 
do him a malicious Injury: say, Imprison 
him for years. One would not suppose 
that It needed any exceptional clearness 
of wit to recognize In this an act of dia- 
bolical cruelty. But In England such a 
recognition provokes a stare of surprise, 
followed by an explanation that the out- 
rage Is punishment or justice or some- 
thing else that is all right, or perhaps 
by a heated attempt to argue that we 
should all be robbed and murdered in 
our beds If such senseless villainies as 
sentences of Imprisonment were not 
committed dally. It is useless to argue 
that even if this were true, which it is 

321 



not, the alternative to adding crimes of 
our own to the crimes from which we 
suffer Is not helpless submission. 
Chlckenpox Is an evil; but If I were to 
declare that we must either submit to It 
or else repress It sternly by seizing 
everyone who suffers from It and pun- 
ishing them by Inoculation with small- 
pox, I should be laughed at; for though 
nobody could deny that the result would 
be to prevent chlckenpox to some ex- 
tent by making people avoid It much 
more carefully, and to effect a further 
apparent prevention by making them 
conceal It very anxiously, yet people 
would have sense enough to see that the 
deliberate propagation of smallpox was 
a creation of evil, and must therefore 
be ruled out In favor of purely humane 
and hygienic measures. Yet In the pre- 
cisely parallel case of a man breaking 
Into my house and stealing my wife's 
diamonds I am expected as a matter of 
course to steal ten years of his life, tor- 
turing him all the time. If he tries to 
322 



defeat that monstrous retaliation by 
shooting me, my survivors hang him. 

Major Barbara, pp. 164, 165. 

nnO ask me to be reverent with what- Reverence 

ever moving appeals to good taste, 
is like asking me to hang from a tree by 
my tail. In me nature has discarded 
the tail, having higher uses for me than 
hanging on trees upside down. She has 
also discarded the bump of venera- 
tion, having nobler attitudes for me 
than kneeling and grovelling. I have 
achieved at least one of the characteris- 
tics of the Superman: the upright pos- 
ture of the soul; and I am as proud of 
it as the first monkey who achieved the 
upright posture of the body, and so felt 
himself a stage nearer the Supermonkey, 
man. Unpublished. 

A REVOLUTIONIST is one who de- Revolution 
"^ sires to discard the existing social 
order and try another. 
The constitution of England is revolu- 

323 



tlonary. To a Russian or Anglo-In- 
dian bureaucrat, a general election is as 
much a revolution as a referendum or 
plebiscite in which the people fight in- 
stead of voting. The French Revolu- 
tion overthrew one set of rulers and 
substituted another w^ith different inter- 
ests and different views. That is what 
a general election enables the people to 
do in England every seven years if they 
choose. Revolution is therefore a na- 
tional institution in England; and its 
advocacy by an Englishman needs no 
apology. 

Every man is a revolutionist concerning 
the thing he understands. For example, 
every person who has mastered a pro- 
fession is a sceptic concerning it, and 
consequently a revolutionist. 
Every genuinely religious person is a 
heretic and therefore a revolutionist. 
All who achieve real distinction in life 
begin as revolutionists. The most dis- 
tinguished persons become more revolu- 
tionary as they grow older, though they 

324 



are commonly supposed to become more 
conservative owing to their loss of faith 
in conventional methods of reform. 
Any person under the age of thirty, 
who, having any knowledge of the ex- 
isting social order, is not a revolution- 
ist, is an inferior. 

And Yet 
Revolutions have never lightened the 
burden of tyranny: they have only 
shifted it to another shoulder. 

Man and Superman, pf). 179, 180. 

Here am I, for instance, by class a re- 
spectable man, by common sense a hater 
of waste and disorder, by intellectual 
constitution legally minded to the verge 
of pedantry, and by temperament appre- 
hensive and economically disposed to 
the limit of old maidishness; yet I am, 
and have always been, and shall now al- 
ways be, a revolutionary writer, because 
our laws make law impossible; our lib- 
erties destroy all freedom; our property 
is organized robbery; our morality is 

32s 



an Impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom Isj 
administered by Inexperienced or malex-^' 
perlenced dupes, our power wielded by 
cowards and weaklings, and our honor 
false In all Its points. I am an enemy 
of the existing order for good reasons; 
but that does not make my attacks any 
less encouraging or helpful to people 
who are Its enemies for bad reasons. 
The existing order may shriek that if 
I tell the truth about It, some foolish 
person may drive it to become still worse 
by trying to assassinate It. I cannot 
help that, even if I could see what worse 
it could do than it Is already doing. 

Major Barbara, p. 197. . 

It has been said that the French Revo- 
lution was the work of Voltaire, Rous- 
seau and the Encyclopedists. It seems 
to me to have been the work of men 
who had observed that virtuous indig- 
nation, caustic criticism, conclusive argu- 
ment and Instructive pamphleteering, 
even when done by the most earnest 
326 



and witty literary geniuses, were as use- 
less as praying, things going steadily 
from bad to worse whilst the Social 
Contract and the pamphlets of Voltaire 
were at the height of their vogue. 
Eventually, as we know, perfectly re- 
spectable citizens and earnest philan- 
thropists connived at the September 
massacres because hard experience had 
convinced them that if they contented 
themselves with appeals to humanity 
and patriotism, the aristocracy, though 
it would read their appeals with the 
greatest enjoyment and appreciation, 
flattering and admiring the writers, 
would none the less continue to conspire 
with foreign monarchists to undo the 
revolution and restore the old system 
with every circumstance of savage ven- 
geance and ruthless repression of pop- 
ular liberties. Major Barbara, pp. 
177, 178. 

The most pig-headed Englishman has 
a much stronger objection to be crushed 

327 



or killed by institutions and conventions, i 
however sacred or even respectable, 
than a Russian peasant or a Chinaman. ' 
If he commits a sin, he either tells a] 
lie and sticks to it, or else demands " al 
broadening of thought " which will j 
bring his sin within the limits of thcij 
allowable. To expiation, if it can pos- 1 
sibly be avoided, he has a wholesome 
and energetic objection. He is an in- 
dividualist, not a fatalist: with all his;! 
apparent conventionahty there is no get- 
ting over the fact that institutions — 
moral, political, artistic, and ecclesiasti- 
cal — which in more Eastern lands have 
paralysed whole races, making each cen- 
tury a mere stereotype of the one before, 
are mere footballs for the centuries in 
England. It is an instinct with me per- 
sonally to attack every idea which has ■ 
been full grown for ten years, espe- 
cially if it claims to be the foundation of 
all human society. I am prepared to 
back human society against any idea, 
positive or negative, that can be brought 
328 



Into the field against it. In this — ex- 
cept as to my definite Intellectual con- 
sciousness of it — I am, I believe, a much 
more typical and popular person In 
England than the conventional man; 
and I believe that when we begin to 
produce a genuine na'tlonal drama, this 
apparently anarchic force, the mother 
;of higher law and humaner order, will 
[underlie it, and that the public will lose 
iall patience with the conventional col- 
llapses which serve for last acts to the 
iserlous dramas of to-day. Depend 
lupon It, the miserable doctrine that life 
Is a mess, and that there is no way out 
;of it, will never nerve any man to write 
a truly heroic play west of the Cau- 
casus. The Saturday Review, i8th 
January 1896. 

'"pHE persons of my plays are all right Right and 

from their several points of view; ^^^^ 
land their points of view are, for the 
dramatic moment, mine also. This 
may puzzle the people who believe that 

329 



there is such a thing as an absolutely 
right point of view, usually their own. 
It may seem to them that nobody who 
doubts this can be in a state of grace. 
However that may be, it is certainly 
true that nobody who agrees with them 
can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed 
anything else that turns upon a knowl- 
edge of mankind. Hence it has been 
pointed out that Shakespear had no 
conscience. Neither have I, in that 
sense. Man and Superman, p. xxvi. 

STEPHEN. I know the difference be- 
tween right and wrong. 
UNDERSHAFT [hugely tickled] You 
dont say so! What! no capacity for 
business, no knowledge of law, no sym- 
pathy with art, no pretension to philos- 
ophy; only a simple knowledge of the 
secret that has puzzled all the philoso- 
phers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled 
all the men of business, and ruined most 
of the artists: the secret of right and 
wrong. Why, man, youre a genius, a 

330 



master of masters, a god! At twenty- 
four, too ! 

STEPHEN [keeping his temper with difp- 
culty] You are pleased to be facetious. 
I pretend to nothing more than any hon- 
orable English gentleman claims as his 
birthright. 

UNDERSHAFT. Oh, thats everybody's 
birthright. Look at poor little Jenny 
Hill, the Salvation lassie! she would 
think you were laughing at her If you 
asked her to stand up In the street and 
teach grammar or geography or mathe- 
matics or even drawing-room dancing; 
but it never occurs to her to doubt that 
she can teach morals and religion. 
You are all alike, you respectable peo- 
ple. You cant tell me the bursting 
strain of a ten-Inch gun, which is a very 
simple matter; but you all think you 
can tell me the bursting strain of a man 
under temptation. You darent handle 
high explosives; but youre all ready to 
handle honesty and truth and justice 
and the whole duty of man, and kill 

331 



one another at that game. What a 
country! what a world! Major Bar' 
bara, pp. 278, 279. 

1 1 

The Right 'T'HE right to live Is a Natural Right: 
to Live X ^^^^ jg |.Q g^y 1^ must be dogmati- 

cally postulated before any political 
constitution is possible. All argument 
on the matter leads irresistibly to Nir- 
vana — to universal suicide; and this 
must be rejected as a reductio ad ah- 
surdiim, and a purely dogmatic Will to 
Live accepted as the basis from which 
all social order must start. 

Correspondence. 

I should make each citizen appear be- 
fore a Board once in seven years and 
defend his claim to live. If he could 
not, then he should be put into a lethal 
chamber. He could, of course, be rep- 
resented by counsel, and Death would be 
represented by an Attorney General. 

Correspondence, 

332 



"D OMANCE Is always, I think, a Romance 

product of ennui, an attempt to es- 
cape from a condition In which real life 
appears empty, prosaic and boresome 
— therefore essentially a gentlemanly 
product. The man who has grappled 
with real life, flesh to flesh and spirit 
to spirit, has little patience with fools' 
paradises. When Carlyle said to the 
emigrants, " Here and now is your 
America," he spoke as a realist to ro- 
manticists; and Ibsen was of the same 
mind when he finally decided that there 
Is more tragedy in the next suburban 
villa than In a whole imaginary Italy of 
unauthentic Borgias. Indeed, In our 
present phase, romance has become the 
literary trade of Imaginative weaklings 
who have neither the energy to gain ex- 
perience of life nor the genius to divine 
It. The Saturday Review, 26th June 
1897. 

When mankind gets a serious fit, and 
the desire for a true knowledge of the 

333 



world and a noble life In It at all costs 
arises In men and lifts them above lust- 
ing for the trivial luxuries and Ideals 
and happy endings of romance, ro- 
mance, repudiated by art and challenged 
by religion, falls back on its citadel, and 
announces that It has given up all the 
pomps and vanities of this wicked 
world, and recognizes that nothing Is 
eternally valid and all-redeeming but 
Love. That is to say, the romanticist 
is blind enough to Imagine that the 
humanist will accept the abandonment 
of all his minor lies as a bribe for the 
toleration of the most Impudent of all 
lies. " I am willing to be redeemed, 
and even religious," says the converted 
romanticist, " if only the business be 
managed by a pretty woman who will 
be left In my arms when the curtain 
falls." The Saturday Review, 23rd 
October 1897. 

For all that, the land of dreams Is a 
wonderful place; and the great Roman- 

334 



i 



cers who found the key of Its gates were 
no Alnaschars. These artists, Inspired 
neither by faith and beatitude, nor by 
strife and reahzation, were neither 
saints nor crusaders, but pure enchan- 
ters, who conjured up a region where 
existence touches you delicately to the 
very heart, and where mysteriously 
thrilling people, secretly known to you 
In dreams of your childhood, enact a life 
In which terrors are as fascinating as 
delights ; so that ghosts and death, agony 
and sin, become, like love and victory, 
phrases of an unaccountable ecstasy. 
Goethe bathed by moonlight in the 
Rhine to learn this white magic^ and 
saturated even the criticism and didacti- 
cism of Faust with the strangest charm 
by means of It. Mozart was a most 
wonderful enchanter of this kind: he 
drove very clever men — Oublicheff, for 
example — clean out of their wits by his 
airs from heaven and blasts from hell 
In Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Gio- 
vanni, From the middle of the elgh- 

335 



teenth to the middle of the nineteenth 
century Art went crazy In Its search for 
spells and dreams; and many artists 
who, being neither Mozart's nor 
Goethes, had their minds burnt up in- 
stead of cleansed by " the sacred fire,'^ 
yet could make that fire cast shadows 
that gave unreal figures a strange 
majesty, and phantom landscapes a 
*' light that never was on sea or land." 
These phrases which I quote were then 
the commonplaces of critics' rhapsodies. 
Today, alas ! — I mean thank good- 
ness ! — all this rhapsodizing makes peo- 
ple stare at me as at Rip Van Winkle. 
The lithographs of Delacroix, the 
ghostly tam-tam march in Robert the 
Devil, the tinkle of the goat's bell In 
Dinorah, the illustrations of Gustave 
Dore, mean nothing to the elect of this 
stern generation but an unintelligible 
refuse of bad drawing; barren, ugly 
orchestral tinkering; senseless and de- 
based ambition. We have been led 
forth from the desert In which these 

336 



mirages were always on the horizon to 
a land overflowing with reality and 
earnestness. But if I were to be stoned 
for it this afternoon by fervent Wag- 
nerites and Ibsenites, I must declare 
that the mirages were once dear and 
beautiful, and that the whole Wagner- 
ian criticism of them, however salutary 
(I have been myself one of its most 
ruthless practitioners), has all along 
been a pious dialectical fraud, because 
it applies the tests of realism and reve- 
lation to the arts of illusion and trans- 
figuration. From the point of view of 
the Building Act the palaces built by 
Mr. Brock, the pyrotechnist, may be 
most pestilent frauds; but that only 
shews that Mr. Brock's point of view 
is not that of the Building Act, though 
it might be very necessary to deliberate- 
ly force that criticism on his works if 
real architecture shewed signs of being 
seduced by the charms of his coloured 
fires. It was just such an emergency 
that compelled Wagner to resort to the 

337 



pious dialectical fraud against his old 
romanticist loves. Their enchantments 
were such that their phantasms, which 
genius alone could sublimate from real 
life, became the models after which the 
journeyman artist worked and was 
taught to work, bhnding him to nature 
and reality, from which alone his tal- 
ent could gain nourishment and origi- 
nality, and setting him to waste his life 
in outlining the shadows of shadows, 
with the result that Romanticism be- 
came, at second hand, the blight and 
dry rot of Art. Then all the earnest 
spirits, from Ruskin and the pre- 
Raphaelites to Wagner and Ibsen, rose 
up and made war on it. Salvator Rosa, 
the romantic painter, went down before 
the preaching of Ruskin as Delacroix 
has gone down before the practice of 
John Maris, Von Uhde, and the im- 
pressionists and realists whose work led 
up to them. Meyerbeer was brutally 
squelched, and Berlioz put out of coun- 
tenance, by the preaching and practice 

338 



of Wagner. And after Ibsen — nay, 
even after the cup-and-saucer realists — 
we no longer care for Schiller; Victor 
Hugo, on his spurious, violently roman- 
tic side, only incommodes us; and the 
spirit of such a wayward masterpiece 
of Romanticism as Alfred de Musset's 
Lorenzaccio would miss fire with us al- 
together if we could bring ourselves to 
wade through the morass of pseudo- 
medieval Florentine chatter with which 
it begins. Saturday Review, 26th June 
1897. 

AXT'HAT Is called Science has always The 
^ ^ pursued the Elixir of Life and the S°Senci 
Philosopher's Stone, and is just as busy 
after them to-day as ever It was In the 
days of Paracelsus. We call them by 
different names: Immunization or Radi- 
ology or what not ; but the dreams which 
lure us Into the adventures from which 
we learn are always at bottom the same. 
The Doctor's Dilemma, p. xc. 
339 



Routine TT IS a chcrlshed tradition in English 
oraiy X polltlcs that at a meeting of Lord 
Melbourne's Cabinet in the early days 
of Queen Victoria, the Prime Minister, 
when the meeting threatened to break 
up in confusion, put his back to the door 
and said, in the cynically profane man- 
ner then fashionable: ''Gentlemen: we 
can tell the House the truth or we can 
tell it a lie; I do not care a damn which. 
All I Insist on is that we shall all tell 
the same lie; and you shall not leave the 
room until you have settled what it is 
to be." Just so does the bourgeois per- 
ceive that the essential thing Is not 
whether a convention is right or wrong, 
but that everybody shall know what it is 
and observe It. His cry Is always : " I 
want to know where I stand." Tell him 
what he may do and what he may not 
do ; and make him feel that he may de- 
pend on other people doing or not do- 
ing the same; and he feels secure, know- 
ing where he stands and where other 
people stand. His dread and hatred of 

340 



revolutions and heresies and men with 
original ideas is his dread of disorienta- 
tion and insecurity. Three Plays by 
Brieux, Preface, p. xxxv. 

^ .^ 

Let cruelty or kindness or anything else 
once become customary and it will be 
practised by people to whom it is not at 
all natural, but whose rule of life is sim- 
ply to do only what everybody else does, 
and who would lose their employment 
and starve if they indulged in any pe- 
culiarity. A respectable man will lie 
daily, in speech and in print, about the 
qualities of the article he lives by selling, 
because it is customary to do so. He 
will flog his boy for telling a lie, because 
it is customary to do so. He will also 
flog him for not telling a lie if the boy 
tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, 
because it is customary to do so. He 
will give the same boy a present on his 
birthday, and buy him a spade and 
bucket at the seaside, because it is cus- 
tomary to do so, being all the time 

341 



neither particularly mendacious, nor 
particularly cruel, nor particularly gen- 
erous, but simply Incapable of ethical 
judgment or Independent action. 

The Doctor's Dilemma, pp. 1., li. 

Those who have felt earthquakes as- 
sure us that there Is no terror like the 
terror of the earth swaying under the 
feet that have always depended on It as 
the one Immovable thing In the world. 
That Is just how the ordinary respect- 
able man feels when some man of genius 
rocks the moral ground beneath him by 
denying the validity of a convention. 
Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. xxxv. 

Nothing that Is admittedly and unmis- 
takably horrible matters very much, be- 
cause It frightens people into seeking a 
remedy: the serious horrors are those 
which seem entirely respectable and nor- 
mal to respectable and normal men. 
Three Plays by Brieux^ Preface, pp. xlv., 

XV. 

342 



nPHE real secret of the terror inspired Routine 
by an original thinker is that in re- Sfh? 
pudiating convention he Is repudiating Superman 
that on which his neighbors are relying 
for their sense of security. But he is 
usually also doing something even more 
unpopular. He Is proposing new obli- 
gations to add to the already heavy 
burden of duty. When the boy Shelley 
entertained his college friends by elab- 
orately and solemnly cursing his father, 
he only shocked us. But when the man 
Shelley told us that we should feed, 
clothe, and educate all the children in 
the country as carefully as if they were 
our immediate own, we lost our tempers 
with him, and deprived him of the cus- 
tody of his own children. Three Plays 
by Brieux, Preface, p. xxxlv. 

TN short, saving and investment are saving 

quite secondary duties: the first and 
the hardest is expenditure on present 
needs. Saving, investment, life assur- 
ance, all of them most prudent and ex- 

343 



cellent operations for people who have 
had as much of present nourishment as 
they need, and still have something to 
spare, are, for heads of families In a 
state of privation, slow forms of sui- 
cide and murder; and those who preach 
them Indiscriminately should be Indicted 
for Incitement to crime. When a bishop 
offends In this way, people who really 
understand the situation feel their blood 
rising almost to guillotining point. 
The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- 
ing, p. 97. 

Any fool can save money: It takes a 
wise man to spend It. Unpublished. 

r)ON JUAN [to the Devil] My 
^"^ friend, beauty, purity, respectabil- 
ity, religion, morality, art, patriotism, 
bravery and the rest are nothing but 
words which I or anyone else can turn 
inside out like a glove. They are mere 
words, useful for duping barbarians 
into adopting civilization, or the clvll- 

344 



ized poor Into submitting to be robbed 
and enslaved. That is the family secret 
of the governing caste; and if we who 
are of that caste aimed at more Life 
for the world instead of at more power 
and luxury for our miserable selves, that 
secret would make us great. Man and 
Superman, p. 131. 

T HAVE not failed to observe that all seu- 

the drugs, from tea to morphia, and 
all the drams, from lager beer to 
brandy, dull the edge of self-criticism 
and make a man content with something 
less than the best work of which he is 
soberly capable. He thinks his work 
better, when he is really only more eas- 
ily satisfied with himself. On Going to 
Church. The Savoy, January 1898, 
p. 14. 

The part played in evolution by the 
voluptuary will be the same as that al- 
ready played by the glutton. The glut- 
ton, as the man with the strongest mo- 
tive for nourishing himself, will always 

345 



Self- 
Sacrifice 



take more pains than his fellows to get 
food. When food is so difficult to get 
that only great exertions can secure a 
sufficient supply of it, the glutton's ap- 
petite develops his cunning and enter- 
prise to the utmost; and he becomes not 
only the best fed but the ablest man in 
the community. But in more hospitable 
climates, or where the social organiza- 
tion of the food supply makes it easy 
for a man to overeat, then the glutton 
eats himself out of health and finally 
out of existence. All other voluptuaries 
prosper and perish in the same way; 
and this is why the survival of the fittest 
means finally the survival of the self- . 
controlled, because they alone can adapt ' 
themselves to the perpetual shifting of 
conditions produced by industrial prog- 
ress. Man and Superman, p. 195. 

'^fO one ever feels helpless by the 
side of the self-helper; whilst the 
self-sacrificer is always a drag, a re- 
sponsibility, a reproach, an everlasting 

346 



and unnatural trouble with whom no 
really strong soul can live. Only those 
who have helped themselves know how 
to help others, and to respect their right 
to help themselves. Although roman- 
tic idealists generally insist on self-sur- 
render as an indispensable element in 
true womanly love, its repulsive effect is 
well known and feared in practice by 
both sexes. The extreme instance is the 
reckless self-abandonment seen in the in- 
fatuation of passionate sexual desire. 
Every one who becomes the object of 
that infatuation shrinks from it instinc- 
tively. Love loses its charm when it 
is not free; and whether the compulsion 
is that of custom and law, or of infatu- 
ation, the effect is the same : it becomes 
valueless. The desire to give inspires 
no affection unless there is also the 
power to withhold; and the successful 
wooer, in both sexes alike, is the one 
who can stand out for honorable condi- 
tions, and, failing them, go without. 
Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 35, 36. 

347 



shakespear 12 UT I am bound to add that I pity 
the man who cannot enjoy Shake- 
spear. He has outlasted thousands of 
abler thinkers, and will outlast a thou- 
sand more. His gift of telling a story 
(provided some one else told it to him 
first) ; his enormous power over lan- 
guage, as conspicuous in his senseless 
and silly abuse of it as in his miracles 
of expression; his humor; his sense of 
idiosyncratic character; and his prodig- 
ious fund of that vital energy which is, 
it seems, the true differentiating prop- 
erty behind the faculties, good, bad or 
indifferent, of the man of genius, enable 
him to entertain us so effectively that the 
imaginary scenes and people he has 
created become more real to us than 
our actual life — at least, until our 
knowledge and grip of actual life begins 
to deepen and glow beyond the com- 
mon. When I was twenty I knew 
everybody in Shakespear, from Hamlet 
to Abhorson, much more intimately than 
I knew my living contemporaries; and 

348 



to this day, if the name of Pistol or 
Polonius catches my eye In a newspaper, 
I turn to the passage with more curios- 
ity than If the name were that of — but 
perhaps I had better not mention any 
one in particular. The Saturday Re- 
view, 26th September 1896. 

Shakespear's power lies In his enormous 
command of word-music, which gives 
fascination to his most blackguardly 
repartees and sublimity to his hollowest 
platitudes, besides raising to the highest 
force all his gifts as an observer, an imi- 
tator of personalmannerlsmsandcharac- 
terlstlcs, a humorist and a story-teller. 
Shakespear's weakness lies in his com- 
plete deficiency in that highest sphere of 
thought, in which poetry embraces re- 
ligion, philosophy, morality, and the 
bearing of these on communities, which 
is sociology. His characters have no 
religion, no politics, no conscience, no 
hope, no convictions of any sort. There 
are, as Ruskin pointed out, no heroes 

349 



In Shakespear. His test of the worth 
of life Is the vulgar hedonic test, and 
since life cannot be justified by this or 
any other external test, Shakespear 
comes out of his reflective period a vul- 
gar pessimist, oppressed with a logical 
demonstration that life Is not worth liv- 
ing, and only surpassing Thackeray In 
respect of being fertile enough, instead 
of repeating " Vanltas vanltatum " at 
second-hand, to word the futile doctrine 
differently and better In such passages 
as " Out, out, brief candle." This does 
not mean that Shakespear lacked the 
enormous fund of joyousness which is 
the secret of genius, but simply that, like 
most middle-class Englishmen bred In 
private houses, he was a very incompe- 
tent thinker, and took it for granted 
that all Inquiry Into life began and ended 
with the question " Does It pay?." 
Which, as I could have told him, and as 
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton could have told 
him, is not the point. The Daily News, 
27th April 1905. 

350 



w 



HAT a pity It Is that people who shake- 
love the sound of Shakespear so muSc^ 
seldom go on the stage ! The ear Is the 
sure clue to him: only a musician can 
understand the play of feeling which Is 
the real rarity In his early plays. In a 
deaf nation these plays would have died 
long ago. The moral attitude In them 
Is conventional and second-hand: the 
borrowed Ideas, however finely ex- 
pressed, have not the overpowering 
human Interest of those original criti- 
cisms of life which supply the rhetorical 
element In his later works. Even the 
Individualization which produces that 
old-established British specialty, the 
Shakespearean " delineation of charac- 
ter," owes all Its magic to the turn of 
the line, which lets you Into the secret 
of Its utterer's mood and temperament, 
not by Its commonplace meaning, but by 
some subtle exaltation, or stultification, 
or slyness, or delicacy, or hesitancy, or 
what not In the sound of It. In short. 
It Is the score and not the libretto that 

351 



keeps the work alive and fresh; and this 
is why only musical critics should be al- 
lowed to meddle with Shakespear — es- 
pecially early Shakespear. The Satur- 
day Review, 2nd February 1895. 

Why Is It that Da Ponte's " dramma 
glocosa," entitled Don Giovanni, a loath- 
some story of a coarse, witless, worth- 
less libertine, who kills an old man in a 
duel and Is finally dragged down through 
a trapdoor to hell by his twaddling 
ghost, is still, after more than a cen- 
tury, as "immortal" as Much Ado? 
Simply because Mozart clothed it with 
wonderful music, which turned the 
worthless words and thoughts of Da 
Ponte into a magical human drama of 
moods and transitions of feeling. That 
is what happened In a smaller way with 
Much Ado. Shakespear shews himsel«f 
In It a commonplace librettist working 
on a stolen plot, but a great musician. 
No matter how poor, coarse, cheap and 
obvious the thought may be, the mood 

352 



Is charming, and the music of the words 
expresses the mood. Paraphrase the en- 
counters of Benedick and Beatrice In the 
style of a blue book, carefully preserving 
every Idea they present, and It will be- 
come apparent to the most Infatuated 
Shakespearean that they contain at best 
nothing out of the common In thought 
or wit, and at worst a good deal of vul- 
gar naughtiness. Paraphrase Goethe, 
Wagner or Ibsen In the same way, and 
you win find original observation, subtle 
thought, wide comprehension, far-reach- 
ing Intuition, and serious psychological 
study In them. Give Shakespear a fairer 
chance In the comparison by paraphras- 
ing even his best and maturest work, and 
you will still get nothing more than the 
platitudes of proverbial philosophy, with 
a very occasional curiosity In the shape 
of a rudiment of some modern Idea, not 
followed up. Not until the Shakespear- 
ean music Is added by replacing the para- 
phrase with the original lines does the 
enchantment begin. Then you are in 

353 



another world at once. When a flower- 
girl tells a coster to hold his jaw, for 
nobody is listening to him, and he re- 
torts, " Oh, youre there, are you, you 
beauty? " they reproduce the wit of Bea- 
trice and Benedick exactly. But put it 
this way. " I wonder that you will still 
be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody 
marks you." '' What ! my dear Lady 
Disdain, are you yet living? " You are 
miles away from costerland at once. 
When I tell you that Benedick and the 
coster are equally poor in thought, Bea- 
trice and the flower-girl equally vulgar 
in repartee, you reply that I might as 
well tell you that a nightingale's love is 
no higher than a cat's. Which is ex- 
actly what I do tell you, though the 
nightingale is the better musician. You 
will admit, perhaps, that the love of the 
worst human singer in the world is ac- 
companied by a higher degree of intel- 
lectual consciousness than that of the 
most ravishingly melodious nightingale. 
Well, in just the same way, there are 

354 



plenty of quite second-rate writers who 
are abler thinkers and wits than Wil- 
liam, though they are unable to weave 
his magic Into the expression of their 
thoughts. 

It is not easy to knock this into the pub- 
lic head, because comparatively few of 
Shakespear's admirers are at all con- 
scious that they are listening to music as 
they hear his phrases turn and his lines 
fall so fascinatingly and memorably; 
whilst we all, no matter how stupid we 
are, can understand his jokes and plati- 
tudes, and are flattered when we are told 
of the subtlety of the wit we have rel- 
ished, and the profundity of the thought 
we have fathomed. Englishmen are 
specially susceptible to this sort of flat- 
tery, because Intellectual subtlety is not 
their strong point. In dealing with them 
you must make them believe that you are 
appealing to their brains when you are 
really appealing to their senses and feel- 
ings. With Frenchmen the case is re- 
versed : you must make them believe that 

355 



you are appealing to their senses and 
feelings when you are really appealing 
to their brains. The Englishman, slave 
to every sentimental Ideal and dupe of 
every sensuous art, will have It that his 
great national poet Is a thinker. The 
Frenchman, enslaved and duped only by 
systems and calculations, Insists on his 
hero being a sentimentalist and artist. 
That Is why Shakespear Is esteemed a 
master-mind In England, and wondered 
at as a clumsy barbarian In France. The 
Saturday Review, 26th February 1898. 



EAMLET 

lvl^?l lyf R. FORBES ROBERTSON is es- 
piays lYJ. sentlally a classical actor. What 
I mean by classical Is that he can present 
a dramatic hero as a man whose passions 
are those which have produced the phi- 
losophy, the poetry, the art, and the 
statecraft of the world, and not merely 
those which have produced Its weddings, 
coroner's Inquests, and executions. And 

356 



that Is just the sort of actor that Hamlet 
requires. A Hamlet who only under- 
stands his love for Ophelia, his grief 
for his father, his vindictive hatred of 
his uncle, his fear of ghosts, his Impulse 
to snub Rosencrantz and GuUdenstern, 
and the sportsman's excitement with 
which he lays the " mouse-trap " for 
Claudius, can, with sufficient force or 
virtuosity of execution, get a great repu- 
tation in the part, even though the very 
intensity of his obsession by these senti- 
ments (which are common not only to 
all men but to many animals), shews 
that the characteristic side of Hamlet, 
the side that differentiates him from 
Fortlnbras, is absolutely outside the ac- 
tor's consciousness. Such a reputation 
is the actor's, not Hamlet's. Hamlet is 
not a man In whom " common human- 
ity" Is raised by great vital energy to a 
heroic pitch, like Corlolanus or Othello. 
On the contrary, he Is a man In whom 
the common personal passions are so 
superseded by wider and rarer Interests, 

357 



and so discouraged by a degree of criti- 
cal self-consciousness which makes the 
practical efficiency of the instinctive man 
on the lower plane impossible to him, 
that he finds the duties dictated by con- 
ventional revenge and ambition as dis- 
agreeable a burden as commerce is to 
a poet. Even his instinctive sexual im- 
pulses offend his intellect; so that when 
he meets the woman who excites them 
he invites her to join him in a bitter and 
scornful criticism of their joint absurdity, 
demanding " What should such fellows 
as I do crawling between heaven and 
earth? Why would'st thou be a breeder 
of sinners? " and so forth, all of which 
is so completely beyond the poor girl 
that she naturally thinks him mad. And, 
indeed, there is a sense in which Hamlet 
is insane; for he trips over the mistake 
which lies on the threshold of intellec- 
tual self-consciousness: that of bringing 
life to utilitarian or Hedonistic tests, 
thus treating it as a means instead of an 
end. Because Polonius is " a foolish 

358 



prating knave,'* because Rosencrantz 
and Gulldenstern are snobs, he kills them 
as remorselessly as he. might kill a flea, 
shewing that he has no real belief In the 
superstitious reason which he gives for 
not killing himself, and in fact antici- 
pating exactly the whole course of the In- 
tellectual history of Western Europe un- 
til Schopenhauer found the clue that 
Shakespear missed. But to call Hamlet 
mad because he did not anticipate Scho- 
penhauer is like calling Marcellus mad 
because he did not refer the Ghost to the 
Psychical Society. It Is In fact not possi- 
ble for any actor to represent Hamlet 
as mad. He may (and generally does) 
combine some notion of his own of a 
man who is the creature of affectionate 
sentiment with the figure drawn by the 
lines of Shakespear; but the result Is not 
a madman, but simply one of those mon- 
sters produced by the Imaginary com- 
binations of two normal species, such as 
sphinxes, mermaids, or centaurs. And 
this Is the Invariable resource of the in- 

3S9 



stinctive, imaginative, romantic actor 
You will see him weeping bucketsful on 
tears over Ophelia, and treating thd 
players, the grave-digger, Horatio 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as if the} 
were mutes at his own funeral. But gc 
and watch Mr. Forbes Robertson'j 
Hamlet seizing delightedly on every op' 
portunity for a bit of philosophic dis 
cussion or artistic recreation to escape; 
from the " cursed spite " of revenge ancc 
love and other common troubles; see 
how he brightens up when the players 
come; how he tries to talk philosophy 
with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the 
moment they come into the room; how 
he stops on his country walk with Hora- 
tio to lean over the churchyard wall and 
draw out the gravedigger whom he sees 
singing at his trade; how even his fits 
of excitement find expression In declaim- 
ing scraps of poetry; how the shock 
of Ophelia's death relieves itself In 
the fiercest intellectual contempt for 
Laertes's ranting, whilst an hour after- 
360 



wards, when Laertes stabs him, he bears 
po malice for that at all, but embraces 
ilm gallantly and comradely; and how 
he dies as we forgive everything to 
Charles 11. for dying, and makes '' the 
rest Is silence " a touchlngly humorous 
apology for not being able to finish his 
business. See all that ; and you have seen 
a true classical Hamlet. Nothing half 
so charming has been seen by this gen- 
teration. It will bear seeing again and 
again. The Saturday Review, 2nd Oc- 
tober 1897. 

JULIUS C^SAR 

X Is when we turn to Julius Caesar, the 
most splendidly written political melo- 
drama we possess, that we realize the 
apparently Immortal author of Hamlet 
as a man, not for all time, but for an 
age only, and that, too. In all solidly wise 
md heroic aspects, the most despicable 
^f all the ages in our history. It is im- 
possible for even the most judlcially- 
Tilnded critic to look without a revulsion 
f Indignant contempt at this travestying 
361 



of a great man as a silly braggart, whilst 
the pitiful gang of mischief-makers who 
destroyed him are lauded as statesmen! 
and patriots. There Is not a single sen- 
tence uttered by Shakespear's Julius 
Caesar that is, I will not say worthy of 
him, but even worthy of an average 
Tammany boss. Brutus Is nothing but 
a familiar type of English suburban 
preacher: politically he would hardly im- 
press the Thames Conservancy Board. 
Cassius Is a vehemently assertive nonen- 
tity. It Is only when we come to An- 
tony, unctuous voluptuary and self-seek- 
ing sentimental demagogue, that we find 
Shakespear in his depth; and in his 
depth, of course, he is superlative. Re- 
garded as a crafty stage job, the play Is 
a triumph : rhetoric, claptrap, effective 
gushes of emotion, all the devices of 
the popular playwright, are employed 
with a profusion of power that almost 
breaks their backs. No doubt there are 
slips and slovenlinesses of the kind that 
careful revisers eliminate; but they 
362 



count for so little In the mass of accom- 
plishment that it is safe to say that the 
dramatist's art can be carried no further 
on that plane. If Goethe, who under- 
stood Caesar and the significance of his 
death — " the most senseless of deeds " 
he called it — had treated the subject, his 
conception of it would have been as su- 
perior to Shakespear's as St. John's Gos- 
pel is to the Police News; but his treat- 
ment could not have been more magnif- 
icently successful. As far as sonority. 
Imagery, wit, humor, energy of Imagina- 
tion, power over language, and a whim- 
sically keen eye for idiosyncrasies can 
make a dramatist, Shakespear was the 
king of dramatists. Unfortunately, a 
man may have them all, and yet conceive 
high affairs of state exactly as Simon 
Tappertit did. In one of the scenes in 
Julius Caesar a conceited poet bursts Into 
the tent of Brutus and Cassius, and ex- 
horts them not to quarrel with one an- 
other. If Shakespear had been able to 
present his play to the ghost of the great 

363 



Julius, he would probably have had 
much the same reception. He certainly 
would have deserved It. The Saturday 
Review, 29th January 1898. 

THE TAMING OF THE S,HREW 

The Taming of the Shrew is a remark- 
able example of Shakespear's repeated 
attempts to make the public accept real- 
istic comedy. Petruchio is worth fifty 
Orlandos as a human study. The pre- 
liminary scenes In which he shews his 
character by pricking up his ears at the 
news that there Is a fortune to be got 
by any man who will take an ugly and 
ill-tempered woman off her father's 
hands, and hurrying off to strike the bar- 
gain before somebody else picks it up, 
are not romantic; but they give an hon- 
est and masterly picture of a real man, 
whose like we have all met. The actual 
taming of the woman by the methods 
used In taming wild beasts belongs to his 
determination to make himself rich and 
comfortable, and his perfect freedom 

364 



from all delicacy in using his strength 
and opportunities for that purpose. 
The process is quite bearable, because 
the selfishness of the man is healthily 
goodhumored and untainted by wanton 
cruelty; and it is good for the shrew to 
encounter a force like that and be 
brought to her senses. Unfortunately, 
Shakespear's own immaturity, as well 
as the immaturity of the art he was ex- 
perimenting in, made it Impossible for 
him to keep the play on the realistic 
plane to the end; and the last scene is 
altogether disgusting to modern sensi- 
bility. No man with any decency of 
feeling can sit It out In the company 
of a woman without being extremely 
ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral 
Implied in the wager and the speech put 
Into the woman's own mouth. There- 
fore the play, though still worthy of a 
complete and efficient representation, 
would need, even at that, some apology. 
The Saturday Review, 6th November 
1897. 

365 



s^ront ^W'OW that we are nearly done with 
-'^^ the nineteenth century, it can hurt 
no one's feelings to remark that it has 
been one in which the leading faculty has 
been the business faculty, and the lead- 
ing ambition the attainment of unprece- 
dented riches. Functional adaptation 
has worked towards capitalism rather 
than towards art or religion. We have 
kept up an air of supporting the arts by 
substituting respectability for the beauty 
of life, regularity of arrangement for 
the beauty of form, laundry work for 
beauty of color, historical interest for 
beauty of theme, and so on. If you 
take a man in whom this substitution 
has been completely effected by delib- 
erate precept and social environment 
(as far as such dehumanization is pos- 
sible), and present to him a fabric 
which drapes in graceful folds and 
is beautiful in color, he will imme- 
diately pronounce it eminently unsuit- 
able for use as a dress material. The 
folds are irregular, and therefore dis- 
366 



reputable; the color Is sensuous, and 
therefore immoral; the general effect 
appeals to the individual, idiosyncratic 
preference, and is, therefore, eccentric 
and in bad taste. Only, if the color be 
a very bright primary one — say bright 
scarlet or yellow — which will shew the 
least speck of dust or weatherstain, and 
will not, like the tertiary colors, soften 
and actually take on a new beauty as it 
wears, he will admit its suitability for 
uniforms to be worn on State occasions. 
But for everyday wear absolute perfec- 
tion means to him shiny black and shiny 
white — the absence of color with the 
maximum of surface polish, the mini- 
mum of drapery, and the most conclu- 
sive evidence of newness and washed- 
ness. At first his great difficulty 
was with his shirt, because folds 
and even outrageous crumplings were 
unavoidable if it was to be worn 
at all. But, at all events, a part of the 
shirt could be stiff, like a cuirass. So 
he took a piece of linen large enough to 

367 



cover his chest, and at first, not reaUzing 
that it only needed originality and cour- 
age to immediately attain his ideal of 
no folds at all, arranged the folds in 
perfectly rectangular parallel rows, by 
means of his great invention of box- 
pleating. Down the middle, as a last 
concession to the traditions of the 
chemise, he affixed a frill, like a row of 
textile parsley. Thus he produced the 
British Islander's shirtfront. In his de- 
light with it, he attached sleeves and 
a body; starched it within an inch of its 
life; put it on, with a complete clergy- 
man's suit over it; and, restless with joy, 
walked about, sat down, got up, and 
even stooped. On removing the suit, he 
of course discovered that the shirt was 
all crumpled except the front. He there- 
fore cut a large window out of his waist- 
coat, through which the uncrumpled part 
of his masterpiece could be viewed, and 
cut the coat away so as not to obstruct 
the window. And then he was in even- 
ing dress. Later on he discarded the 
368 



row of parsley; the box-pleats went next; 
the button-holes were reduced from three 
to one by the more logical spirits; varie- 
gated studs gave way to the colourless 
diamond or even the vapid mother-of- 
pearl; and finally the shirt was buttoned 
behind, leaving the front so unbrokenly 
perfect that poets and artists could not 
behold it without longing to write a son- 
net or draw a caricature on it. The Sat- 
urday Review, 15th February 1896. 

■ I ' 1 - 
A S to snobbishness, ignorant men are The 
'^ always snobbish, because Nature 
abhors a vacuum. A man's head can- 
not be kept empty. If he is not taught 
to have a wide conception of himself as 
a member of a profession, or as a citi- 
zen, or, as the catechism puts it, as " a 
member of Christ, a child of God, and 
an inheritor of the kingdom" (and the 
clerk who, whether he is an atheist or 
not, has not found a status of that na- 
ture for himself will remain a fool un- 
til he does), he will inevitably have 

369 



a narrow conception founded on his par- 
ticular little family, his particular little 
office, and his particular little set. This 
windy conceit will expand till it fills his 
whole head, and makes a paltry snob 
of him instead of a full grown English- 
man. Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. 

The Clerk ^ February 1908, p. 22. 



chaoi 'T'HE vitality which places nourish- 
-*- ment and children first, heaven and 
hell a somewhat remote second, and the 
health of society as an organic whole 
nowhere, may muddle successfully 
through the comparatively tribal stages 
of gregariousness; but in nineteenth cen- 
tury nations and twentieth century em- 
pires the determination of every man to 
be rich at all costs, and of every wom- 
an to be married at all costs, must, 
without a highly scientific social organi- 
zation, produce a ruinous development 
of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant 
mortality, adult degeneracy, and every- 

370 



thing that wise men most dread. In 
short, there Is no future for men, how- 
ever brimming with crude vltahty, who 
are neither intelligent nor politically 
educated enough to be Socialists. 

Man and Superman, pp. xv., xvi. 



C OCIAL questions are produced by social, 
^ the conflict of human Institutions ^"®^*^°°^ 
with human feeling. For Instance, we 
have certain institutions regulating the 
lives of women. To the woman whose 
feelings are entirely in harmony with 
these institutions there is no Woman 
Question. But during the present cen- 
tury, from the time of Mary Wolle- 
stonecraft onwards, women have been 
developing feelings, and consequently 
opinions, which clash with these Institu- 
tions. The institutions assumed that it 
was natural to a woman to allow her 
husband to own her property and per- 
son, and to represent her in politics as a 
father represents his Infant child. The 

371 



moment that seemed no longer natural 
to some women, It became grievously op- 
pressive to them. Immediately there 
was a woman question. The Problem 
Play. The Humanitarian, May 1895. 



soui TT is cheap work converting starving 
^^^^ men with a Bible in one hand and 
a slice of bread in the other. I will un- 
dertake to convert West Ham to Ma- 
hometanism on the same terms. Try 
your hand on my men : their souls are 
hungry because their bodies are full. 

Major Barbara, p. 299. 



The Soul's \T7HEN I was a fastidious youth, 

Spring YV ,j ^ ^ r 

Cleaning ^ ^ my cldcrs, ever eager to conrer 
bad advice on me and to word it with 
disgusting homeliness, used to tell me 
never to throw away dirty water until 
I got in clean. To which I would re- 
ply that as I had only one bucket, the 
thing was impossible. So until I grew 

372 



middle aged and sordid, I acted on the 
philosophy of Bunyan's couplet: — 

A man there was, tho' some did count 

him mad. 
The more he cast away, the more he 

had. 

Indeed, in the matter of ideals, faiths, 
convictions and the like, I was of opinion 
that Nature abhorred a vacuum, and 
that you might empty your bucket boldly 
with the fullest assurance that you would 
find it fuller than ever before you had 
time to set it down again. But herein 
I youthfully deceived myself. I grew 
up to find the genteel world full of per- 
sons with empty buckets. The Saturday 
Review^ 3rd April 1897. 

npHE tradition of the stage is a tradi- The 

tion of villains and heroes. Shake- vlulfn 
spear was a devout believer in the exist- 
ence of the true villain — the man whose 
terrible secret is that his fundamental 
moral Impulses are by some freak of na- 

373 



ture Inverted, so that not only are love, 
pity, and honor loathsome to him, and 
the affectation of them which society Im- 
poses on him a constant source of dis- 
gust, but cruelty, destruction, and per- 
fidy are his most luxurious passions. 
This Is a totally different phenomenon 
from the survivals of the ape and tiger 
in a normal man. The average normal 
man is covetous, lazy, selfish; but he Is 
not malevolent, nor capable of saying 
to himself, " Evil: be thou my good." 
He only does wrong as a means to an 
end, which he always represents to him- 
self as a right end. The case Is exactly 
reversed with a villain; and It Is my 
melancholy duty to add that we some- 
times find it hard to avoid a cynical sus- 
picion that the balance of social advan- 
tage Is on the side of gifted villainy, 
since we see the able villain, Mephis- 
topheles-llke, doing a huge amount of 
good In order to win the power to do a 
little darling evil, out of which he is as 
likely as not to be cheated in the end; 

374 



whilst your normal respectable man will 
countenance, connive at, and grovel his 
way through all sorts of meanness, base- 
ness, servility, and cruel indifference to 
suffering In order to enjoy a miserable 
two-penn'orth of social position, piety, 
comfort, and domestic affection, of 
which he, too, is often ironically de- 
frauded by Fate. I could point to a 
philanthropist or two — even to their sta- 
tues — whom Posterity, should it ever 
turn from admiring the way they spent 
their money to considering the way they 
got it, wmII probably compare very un- 
favorably with Guy Fawkes. The Sat- 
urday Review, 4th January 1896. 

jpFFECTIVENESS of assertion is style 
^^ the Alpha and Omega of style. He 
who has nothing to assert has no style 
and can have none : he who has some- 
thing to assert will go as far in power 
of style as Its momentousness and his 
conviction will carry him. 

Man and Superman, p. xxxv. 

375 



. . . the wicked doctrine of docility In 

poverty and humility under oppression. 

Major Barbara, p. 189. 



sJ%rman '^F ^^ ^^^^ ^^ havc rcachcd the 
stage of International organization, 
Man's political capacity and magnanim- 
ity are clearly beaten by the vastness 
and complexity of the problems forced 
on him. And It Is at this anx- 
ious moment that he finds, when he 
looks upward for a mightier mind to 
help him, that the heavens are empty. 
He win presently see that his discarded 
formula that Man Is the Temple of the 
Holy Ghost, happens to be precisely 
true, and that It Is only through his own 
brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, 
formerly the most nebulous person 
in the Trinity, and now become its 
sole survivor as it has always been its real 
Unity, can help him In any way. And so, 
if the Superman is to come, he must be 
born of Woman by Man's intentional 

376 



and well-considered contrivance. Con- 
viction of this will smash everything that 
opposes It. Even Property and Mar- 
riage, which laugh at the laborer's petty 
complaint that he Is defrauded of " sur- 
plus value," and at the domestic miseries 
of the slaves of the wedding ring, will 
themselves be laughed aside as the light- 
est of trifles If they cross this conception 
when it becomes a fully realized vital 
purpose of the race. 

Man and Superman, pp. 184, 185. 

Emperor and Galilean might have 
been appropriately, if prosaically, 
named The Mistake of Maximus the 
Mystic. It is Maximus who forces the 
choice on Julian, not as between ambition 
and principle — between Paganism and 
Christianity — between " the old beauty 
that Is no longer beautiful and the new 
truth that is no longer true," but between 
Christ and Julian himself. Maximus 
knows that there is no going back to 
" The first empire " of pagan sensualism. 

377 



" The second empire," Christian or self- 
abnegatory Idealism, Is already rotten 
at heart. '' The third empire " is what 
he looks for: the empire of Man assert- 
ing the eternal validity of his own will. 
He who can see that not on Olympus, not 
nailed to the cross, but In himself is God: 
he is the man to build Brand's bridge be- 
tween the flesh and the spirit, establishing 
this third empire In which the spirit shall 
not be unknown, nor the flesh starved, 
nor the will tortured and baffled. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 65, 66. 

The really Interesting question Is whether 
I am right in assuming that the way to 
produce an Impression of greatness Is by 
exhibiting a man, not as mortifying his 
nature by doing his duty. In the manner 
which our system of putting little men 
Into great positions (not having enough 
great men In our Influential families to 
go round) forces us to inculcate, but as 
simply doing what he naturally wants to 
do. Three Plays for Puritans, p. 207. 
378 



If there were no God, said the eighteenth 
century Deist, it would be necessary to 
invent Him. Now this eighteenth cen- 
tury god was deus ex machina, the god 
who helped those who could not help 
themselves, the god of the lazy and in- 
capable. The nineteenth century decided 
that there is indeed no such god; and now 
Man must take in hand all the work that 
he used to shirk with an idle prayer. He 
must, in effect, change himself into the 
political Providence which he formerly 
conceived as God; and such change is not 
only possible, but the only sort of change 
that is real. The mere transfiguration of 
Institutions, as from military and priestly 
dominance to commercial and scientific 
dominance, from commercial dominance 
to proletarian democracy, from slavery 
to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, 
from monarchy to republicanism, from 
polytheism to monotheism, from mono- 
theism to atheism, from atheism to pan- 
theistic humanltarianism, from general il- 
literacy to general literacy, from romance 

379 



to realism, from realism to mysticism, 
from metaphysics to physics, are all but 
changes from Tweedledum to Tweedle- 
dee; plus qa change, plus c'est la meme 
chose. But the changes from the crab 
apple to the pippin, from the wolf and 
fox to the house dog, from the charger 
of Henry V. to the brewer's draught 
horse and the race horse, are real; for 
here Man has played the god, subdu- 
ing Nature to his Intention, and en- 
nobling or debasing Life for a set pur- 
pose. And what can be done with a 
wolf can be done with a man. If such 
monsters as the tramp and the gentle- 
man can appear as mere by-products of 
Man's Individual greed and folly, what 
might we not hope for as a main prod- 
uct of his universal aspiration? 

Man and Superman, pp. i8i, 182. 

Judge us by the admitted and respected 
practice of our most reputable circles; 
and. If you know the facts and are 
strong enough to look them in the face, 

380 



you must admit that unless we are re- 
placed by a more highly evolved animal 
— in short, by the Superman — the world 
must remain a den of dangerous animals 
among whom our few accidental super- 
men, our Shakespears, Goethes, Shel- 
leys and their like, must live as preca- 
riously as Hon tamers do, taking the 
humor of their situation, and the dig- 
nity of their superiority, as a set-off to 
the horror of the one and the loneliness 
of the other. Man and Superman, pp. 
214, 215. 

The majority of men at present in Eu- 
rope have no business to be alive; and 
no serious progress will be made until 
we address ourselves earnestly and sci- 
entifically to the task of producing trust- 
worthy human material for society. 

The Perfect Wagnerite, p. 67. 

There Is no public enthusiast alive of 
twenty years' practical democratic expe- 
rience who believes in the political ade- 

381 



quacy of the electorate or of the bodies 
it elects. The overthrow of the aristo- 
crat has created the necessity for the 
Superman. Man and Superman, p. 223. 

Men like Ruskin and Carlyle will 
preach to Smith and Brown for the sake 
of preaching, just as St. Francis 
preached to the birds and St. Anthony 
to the fishes. But Smith and Brown, 
like the fishes and birds, remain as they 
are; and poets who plan Utopias and 
prove that nothing is necessary for their 
realization but that Man should will 
them, perceive at last, like Richard 
Wagner, that the fact to be faced is 
that Man does not eliectively will them. 
And he never will until he becomes 
Superman. Man and Superman, p. 
218. 

Until there is an England in which every 
man is a Cromwell, a France in which 
every man is a Napoleon, a Rome in 
which every man is a Caesar, a Germany 
In which every man is a Luther plus a 
382 



Goethe, the world will be no more Im- 
proved by Its heroes than a Brixton 
villa is improved by the pyramid of 
Cheops. The production of such na- 
tions Is the only real change possible to 
us. Alan and Superman, p. 193. 

If human nature, which Is the highest 
organization of life reached on this 
planet, is really degenerating, then hu- 
man society will decay; and no panic- 
begotten penal measures can possibly 
save It: we must, like Prometheus, set 
to work to make new men Instead of 
vainly torturing old ones. The Perfect 
PVagnerite, p. 77. 

DON JUAN. I sing, not arms and the 
hero, but the philosophic man: he who 
seeks in contemplation to discover the 
inner will of the world, in Invention to 
discover the means of fulfilling that will, 
and in action to do that will by the so- 
discovered means. Of all other sorts 
of men I declare myself tired. 

Man and Superman, p. 115. 

383 



I know no harder practical question than 
how much selfishness one ought to stand 
from a gifted person for the sake of his 
gifts or on the chance of his being right 
in the long run. The Superman will 
certainly come like a thief in the night, 
and be shot at accordingly; but we can- 
not leave our property wholly unde- 
fended on that account. On the other 
hand, we cannot ask the Superman sim- 
ply to add a higher set of virtues to cur- 
rent respectable morals; for he is un- 
doubtedly going to empty a good deal 
of respectable morality out like so much 
dirty water, and replace It by new and 
strange customs, shedding old obliga- 
tions and accepting new and heavier 
ones. Every step of his progress must 
horrify conventional people; and if It 
were possible for even the most superior 
man to march ahead all the time, every 
pioneer of the march towards the Super- 
man would be crucified. 

The Sanity of Art, p. 12. 

■ i - i - 

384 



UR shops and business offices are The 



Theatre 



^^^ full of young men living In lonely- 
lodgings, whose only artistic recreation 
Is the theatre. In the theatre we prac- 
tise upon them every art that can make 
their loneliness Intolerable and heighten 
the charm of the bait In the snares of 
the street as they go home. But when 
a dramatist Is enlightened enough to un- 
derstand the danger, and sympathetic 
enough to come to the rescue with a 
play to expose the snare and warn the 
victim, we forbid the manager to per- 
form It on pain of ruin, and denounce 
the author as a corrupter of morals. 
One hardly knows whether to laugh or 
cry at such perverse stupidity. 

Three Plays by Brieiix, p. II. 

'T'OLERATION must be Imposed ar- Toleration 
■^ bitrarlly because It Is not possible 
to make the ordinary moral man under- 
stand what toleration and liberty really 
mean. He will accept them verbally 
with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, be- 

38s 



cause the word toleration has been mor- 
ahzed by eminent Whigs; but what he 
means by toleration is toleration of 
doctrines that he considers enlightened, 
and, by liberty, liberty to do what he 
considers right: that is, he does not 
mean toleration or liberty at all; for 
there is no need to tolerate what ap- 
pears enlightened or to claim liberty 
to do what most people consider 
right. Toleration and liberty have no 
sense or use except as toleration of opin- 
ions that are considered damnable, and 
liberty to do what seems wrong. Set- 
ting Englishmen free to marry their de- 
ceased wife's sisters is not tolerated by 
the people who approve of it, but by 
the people who regard it as incestuous. 
Catholic Emancipation and the admis- 
sion of Jews to parliament needed no 
toleration from Catholics and Jews : the 
toleration they needed was that of the 
people who regarded the one measure 
as a facilitation of idolatry, and the 
other as a condonation of the crucifix- 
386 



Ion. Clearly such toleration Is not 
clamored for by the multitude or by the 
press which reflects Its prejudices. It Is 
essentially one of those abnegations of 
passion and prejudice which the com- 
mon man submits to because uncommon 
men whom he respects as wiser than 
himself assure him that It must be so, 
or the higher affairs of human destiny 
will suffer. The Shewing-up of Blanco 
Posnet, pp. 349, 350. 

' I ^HAT IS, pioneers of the march to The Two 

the plains of heaven (so to speak). 
The second, whose eyes are In the back 
of his head. Is the man who declares 
that It Is wrong to do something that no 
one has hitherto seen any harm In. 
The first, whose eyes are very long- 
sighted and In the usual place. Is the 
man who declares that It Is right to do 
something hitherto regarded as Infa- 
mous. 

The second Is treated with great respect 
387 



by the army. They give him testimo- 
nials; name him the Good Man; and 
hate him like the devil. 
The first is stoned and shrieked at by 
the whole army. They call him all 
manner of opprobrious names; grudge 
him his bare bread and water; and 
secretly adore him as their saviour from 
utter despair. Quintessence of Ibsen- 
ism, pp. I, 2. 



Values 'T'HE DEVIL. I saw a man die: he 
-^ was a London bricklayer's laborer 
with seven children. He left seventeen 
pounds club money; and his wife spent 
it all on his funeral and went into 
the workhouse with the children next 
day. She would not have spent seven- 
pence on her children's schooling: the 
law had to force her to let them be 
taught gratuitously; but on death she 
spent all she had. Man and Superman, 
p. 107. 



388 



WTE have among us a certain num- a vigUance 
^^ ber of people who are_ morbidly Association 
ensitlve to sexual impressions, and 
luite insensible to artistic ones. We 
lave certain sects In which such a con- 
lltion is artificially induced as a matter 
)f religious duty. Children have their 
ffections repressed, and their suscepti- 
nlity to emotional excitement nursed on 
jin, wrath, terror, and vengeance, whilst 
hey are forbidden to go to the theatre 
»r to amuse themselves with stories or 
' profane " pictures. Naturally, when 
;uch people grow up, life becomes to 
hem a prolonged temptation of St. An- 
hony. You try to please them by a 
)icture which appeals to their delight in 
;;raceful form and bright warm colour, 
':o their share in the romance which peo- 
ples the woods and streams with sylphs 
and water maidens, to the innocent and 
highly recreative love of personal 
beauty, which is one of the great ad- 
vantages of having a sex at all. To 
your horror and discomposure, you are 

389 



met by a shriek of " Nude woman : nude I 
woman: police! " The one thing that 
the normal spectator overlooks in the 
picture is the one thing that St. An- 
thony sees in it. Let me again put his 

protest in Mr 's own words: 

*' Nothing can justify the exhibition ofi 
nude and semi-nude women as a means 
of amusement for a mixed audience. 
They are shameful productions, and de- 
serve the condemnation of all right- 
thinking people. The manager de- 
serves, and should have, the immediate 
attention of the County Council." 
You remonstrate, perhaps, from the 

point of view of the artist. Mr 

at once pleads: " They are so very ob- 
viously living. Human nature is so very 
much in evidence." And there you 
have the whole of Mr. 's pessimis- 
tic, misanthropic philosophy in two sen- 
tences. Human nature and the human 
body are to him nasty things. Sex is 
a scourge. Woman is a walking temp- 
tation which should be covered up as 

390 



much as possible. Well, let us be 

charitable to Mr 's Infirmity, and 

ask him, as kindly as may be, what good 
covering women up will do. Carmen- 
clta Is covered up: our skirt dancers are 
all petticoats; each of our serpentine 
dancers carries drapery enough to make 
skirts for a whole dozen schoolgirls. 
And yet they appeal far more to the sex 
Instinct and far less to the artistic In- 
stinct than the Naiads and Phryne. 
There is only one solution of the diffi- 
culty; and that Is for Mr and 

those who sympathize with him to keep 

away from the Theatre. Of 

course that will not protect them alto- 
gether. Every low-necked dress, every 
gust of wind that catches a skirt and 
reveals an ankle, perhaps every child 
In whom " human nature Is In evidence " 
to the extent of a pair of sturdy little 
legs, may be a torment to the victims 
of this most pitiable of all obsessions. 
A quarrel with human nature admits 
of no fundamental remedy except the 

391 



knife; and I should be sorry to see the 
members of the Vigilance Association 
cutting their own throats : they are use- 
ful and even necessary in keeping order 
among the people who suffer from mor- 
bid attractions instead of morbid re- 
pulsions. For it must not be forgotten 

that Mr 's error does not lie in his 

claim that the community shall suppress 
indecent exhibitions, but in his attempt 
to make nudity or semi-nudity the cri- 
terion of Indecency. Perhaps I should 
qualify this statement of his position by 
limiting nudity to the female sex; for I 
notice that the semi-nudity which is quite 
a common spectacle In the case of male 
athletes is not complained of, though, 
if there were anything in the Vigilance 
Association's view of such exhibitions as 
demoralizing, our women ought by this 
time to be much more demoralized than 
our men. The Saturday Review, 6th 
April 1895. 



392 



T ADY. Havent you noticed that peo- The 
■^ pie always exaggerate the value of virtues 
the things they havent got? The poor 
think they need nothing but riches to be 
quite happy and good. Everybody 
worships truth, purity, unselfishness, 
for the same reason — because they 
have no experience of them. Oh, if 
they only knew ! 

INAPOLEON [with angry d eri si o n']\i thty 
only knew! Pray do you know? 
LADY. Yes. I had the misfortune to 
be born good. And it is a misfortune, 
I can tell you. General. I really am 
truthful and unselfish and all the rest 
of it; and it's nothing but cowardice; 
want of character; want of being really, 
strongly, positively oneself. 

The Man of Destiny, p. i88. 



'T'HE greatest force on the side of vivisection 
"^ vivisection is the mighty and indeed 
divine force of curiosity. Here we have 
no decaying tribal instinct which men 

393 



strive to root out of themselves as they 
strive to root out the tiger's lust for 
blood. On the contrary, the curiosity 
of the ape, or of the child who pulls 
out the legs and wings of a fly to see 
what it will do without them, or who, on 
being told that a cat dropped out of 
the window will always fall on its legs, 
immediately tries the experiment on the 
nearest cat from the highest window 
in the house (I protest I did it myself 
from the first floor only) , is as nothing 
compared to the thirst for knowledge 
of the philosopher, the poet, the biolo- 
gist, and the naturalist. . . . When 
Gray said " Where ignorance is bliss, 
'tis folly to be wise," he forgot that it 
is godlike to be wise ; and since nobody 
wants bliss particularly, or could stand 
more than a very brief taste of it if it 
were attainable, and since everybody^ 
by the deepest law of the Life Force, de- 
sires to be godlike, it is stupid, and in- 
deed blasphemous and despairing, to 
hope that the thirst for knowledge will 

394 



either diminish or consent to be subor- 
dinated to any other end whatsoever. 
We shall see later on that the claim 
that has arisen in this way for the 
unconditioned pursuit of knowledge is 
as idle as all dreams of unconditioned 
activity; but none the less the right 
to knowledge must be regarded as 
a fundamental human right. The 
fact that men of science have had to 
fight so hard to secure its recognition, 
and are still so vigorously persecuted 
when they discover anything that Is not 
quite palatable to vulgar people, makes 
them sorely jealous for that right; and 
when they hear a popular outcry for the 
suppression of a method of research 
which has an air of being scientific, their 
first instinct is to rally to the defence 
of that method without further consid- 
eration, with the result that they some- 
times, as in the case of vivisection, pres- 
ently find themselves fighting on a false 
issue. The Doctor's Dilemma, pp. 
xxxix., xl. 

395 



The real remedy for vivisection Is the 
remedy for all the mischief that the 
medical profession and all the other 
professions are doing: namely, more 
knowledge. The juries which send the 
poor Peculiars to prison, and give vivl- 
sectionlsts heavy damages against hu- 
mane persons who accuse them of 
cruelty; the editors and councillors and 
student-led mobs who are striving to 
make Vivisection one of the watch- 
words of our civilization, are not doc- 
tors: they are the British public, all so 
afraid to die that they will cling franti- 
cally to any Idol which promises to cure 
all their diseases, and crucify anyone 
who tells them that they must not only 
die when their time comes, but die like 
gentlemen. In their paroxysms of cow- 
ardice and selfishness they force the doc- 
tors to humor their folly and ignorance. 
The Doctor's Dilemma, p. Ix. 

The right to knowledge is not the only 
right ; and its exercise must be limited by 

396 



respect for other rights, and for Its own 
exercise by others. When a man says 
to Society, '^ May I torture my mother 
in pursuit of knowledge?" Society re- 
plies, "No." If he pleads, "What! 
Not even If I have a chance of finding 
out how to cure cancer by doing It?" 
Society still says, " Not even then." If 
the scientist, making the best of his dis- 
appointment, goes on to ask may he 
torture a dog, the stupid and callous 
people who do not realize that a dog 
Is a fellow-creature, and sometimes a 
good friend, may say Yes; though 
Shakespear, Dr. Johnson, and their like 
may say No. But even those who say 
" You may torture a dog " never say 
" You may torture my dog." And no- 
body says, " Yes, because In the pursuit 
of knowledge you may do as you 
please." Just as even the stupidest peo- 
ple say. In effect, " If you cannot attain 
to knowledge without burning your 
mother, you must do without knowl- 
edge," so the wisest people say, " If you 

397 



cannot attain to knowledge without tor- 
turing a dog, you must do without 
knowledge." The Doctor's Dilemma, 
pp. xli., xlii. 

War 'T^HE DEVIL. In the old chronicles 
■■' you read of earthquakes and pes- 
tilences, and are told that these shewed 
the power and majesty of God and 
the littleness of Man. Nowadays the 
chronicles describe battles. In a battle 
two bodies of men shoot at one another 
with bullets and explosive shells until 
one body runs away, when the others 
chase the fugitives on horseback and cut 
them to pieces as they fly. And this, 
the chronicle concludes, shews the great- 
ness and majesty of empires, and the 
littleness of the vanquished. Over such 
battles the people run about the streets 
yelling with delight, and egg their Gov- 
ernment on to spend hundreds of mil- 
lions of money in the slaughter, whilst 
the strongest Ministers dare not spend 
an extra penny in the pound against the 
398 



poverty and pestilence through which 
they themselves daily walk. 

Man and Superman, p. io8. 



-h-i- 



Lj^ANNY. Our motto is " You can- warnings 
"*• not learn to skate without making 
yourself ridiculous." 

TROTTER. Skate! What has that to 
do with it? 

FANNY. Thats not all. It goes on, 
" The ice of life is slippery." Fanny's 
First Play (unpublished, 19 12). 

Never forget that if you leave your law 
to judges and your religion to bishops 
you will presently find yourself without 
either law or religion. If you doubt 
this, ask any decent judge or bishop. 
Do not ask somebody who does not 
know what a judge is, or what a bishop 
is, or what the law is, or what religion 
is. In other words, do not ask your 
newspaper. Journalists are too poorly 

399 



paid In this country to know anything 
that Is fit for publication. 

Getting Married, p. 204. 

We must either breed political capacity, 
or be ruined by democracy. Man and 
Superman, p. xxlv. ' 

To all wildly popular things comes, sud- 
denly and Inexorably, death without 
hope of resurrection. Saturday Re- 
view, 2nd July 19 10. 



-I-H- 



weaith TJITHERTO the economists had al- 
^ ways treated wealth as though It 
could be measured by exchange value. 
Ruskin exposed this as a fundamental 
error: a profound religious, social and 
philosophical error: In short a damnable 
heresy. He asked whether Tintoretto's 
irremovable, unexchangeable, and con- 
sequently commercially worthless ceiling 
In the School of St. Roch, In Venice, 
was of less value than an obscene French 
lithograph exchangeable for two francs 

400 



fifty in the Rue de RIvoli, and produced 
expressly for sale to English tourists. 
This is but one illustration of Ruskin's 
method of argument. By it he suc- 
ceeded in making an end of the folly of 
measuring social need by commercial 
demand, or wealth by exchange value. 
And he introduced the conception of 
" illth " as a positive thing to be meas- 
ured and dealt with as urgently as 
" wellth." 

Ruskin's advance was reduced to 
pure economics by Stanley Jevons, who 
treated Ruskin's wealth and illth as util- 
ity and disutility; raised anew the whole 
question of value; made an end of the 
theory that value is the result of labor 
instead of being the cause of it; abol- 
ished the old distinction between use 
value and exchange value; and formu- 
lated a law founded on the comparison 
of abstract desirabilities, which gave 
new life to academic economics by 
bringing It into direct relation with hu- 
man passion. Life, Literature and Po- 
401 



litical Economy. Clare Market Re- 
view, January 1906, p. 32. 

pJiSi^^nl npHERE are two things that must be 
-'' set right, or we shall perish, like 
Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as em- 
pire. 

The first is, that the daily ceremony of 
dividing the wealth of the country 
among its inhabitants shall be so con- 
ducted that no crumb shall go to any 
able-bodied adults who are not produc- 
ing by their personal exertions not only 
a full equivalent for what they take, but 
a surplus sufficient to provide for their 
superannuation and pay back the debt 
due for their nurture. 
The second is that the deliberate inflic- 
tion of malicious injuries which now 
goes on under the name of punishment 
be abandoned. AI a jor Barbara, p. 198. 

The wm ^ I ^HE will is our old friend the soul or 
spirit of man; and the doctrine of 
justification, not by works, but by faith, 
402 



clearly derives Its validity from the con- 
sideration that no action, taken apart 
from the will behind It, has any moral 
character; for example, the acts which 
make the murderer and Incendiary In- 
famous are exactly similar to those 
which make the patriotic hero famous. 
" Original sin " Is the will doing mis- 
chief. " Divine grace " Is the will do- 
ing good. Quintessence of Ibsenism, 
p. 12, footnote. 

npHERE is no harder scientific fact In The wm 
-■- the world than the fact that belief ^ ^^"^'^ 
can be produced in practically unlimited 
quantity and intensity, without observa- 
tion or reasoning, and even In defiance 
of both, by the simple desire to believe 
founded on a strong interest in believ- 
ing. Everybody recognizes this in the 
case of the amatory Infatuations of the 
adolescents who see angels and heroes 
in obviously (to others) commonplace 
and even objectionable maidens and 
youths. But it holds good over the en- 

403 



tire field of human activity. The hard- 
est-headed materialist will become a con- 
suiter of table-rappers and slate-writers 
if he loses a child or a wife so beloved 
that the desire to revive and communi- 
cate with them becomes irresistible. 
The cobbler believes that there is noth- 
ing like leather. The Imperialist who 
regards the conquest of England by a 
foreign power as the worst of political 
misfortunes believes that the conquest 
of a foreign power by England would 
be a boon to the conquered. i 

The Doctor's Dilemma, pp. xvii., xviii. 1 



The Will A^T'E can now, as soon as we are 

^d Ytt strong-minded enough, drop the 

quinces Nirvana nonsense, the pessimism, the 

rationalism, the supernatural theology, 

and all the other subterfuges to which 

we cling because we are afraid to look 

life straight in the face and see in it, not 

the fulfilment of a moral law or of the 

deductions of reason, but the satisfac- 

404 



tion of a passion in us of which we can 
give no rational account whatever. 
It is natural for a man to shrink from 
the terrible responsibility thrown on 
him by this inexorable fact. All his 
stock excuses vanish before it: "The 
woman tempted me," " The serpent 
tempted me," " I was not myself at the 
time," " I meant well," " My passion 
got the better of my reason," " It was 
my duty to do it," " The Bible says that 
we should do it," " Everybody does it," 
and so on. Nothing is left but the 
frank avowal: " I did it because I am 
built that way." Every man hates to 
say that. He wants to believe that his 
generous actions are characteristic of 
him, and that his meannesses are aber- 
rations or concessions to the force of 
circumstances. The Sanity of Arty pp. 
58, 59- 



HEN a hungry and penniless man The wui 



and the 



w 

stands between his good and his spirit 
bad angel in front of a baker's shop, the 

40s 



good angel cannot seize and drag him 
away, nor can the bad angel thrust the 
loaf Into his hands. The victory of 
honesty or the consummation of a theft 
must be effected by the man; and his 
choice will depend a good deal on the 
sort of man he Is. Not only Is he an 
indispensable agent; not only Is he the 
vehicle of the force that moves him; 
but he is also the vehicle of the force 
that chooses. He Is, in the old phrase, 
the temple of the Holy Ghost. He has, 
In another old phrase, the divine spark 

within him. Unpublished, 

-i-i - 

Wisdom ly^EN are wise In proportion, not to 
■*-^^ their experience, but to their ca- 
pacity for experience. Man and Super- 
man, p. 239. 

Woman T F wc havc comc to think that the nur- 

sery and the kitchen are the natural 

sphere of a woman, we have done so 

exactly as English children come to 

think that a cage Is the natural sphere 

406 



of a parrot — because they have never 
seen one anywhere else. No doubt 
there are Philistine parrots who agree 
with their owners that it is better to be 
in a cage than out, so long as there is 
plenty of hempseed and Indian corn 
there. There may even be idealist par- 
rots who persuade themselves that the 
mission of a parrot is to minister to the 
happiness of a private family by whis- 
tling and saying " Pretty Polly," and 
that It Is in the sacrifice of Its liberty 
to this altruistic pursuit that a true par- 
rot finds the supreme satisfaction of Its 
soul. I will not go so far as to affirm 
that there are theological parrots who 
are convinced that Imprisonment is the 
will of God because It is unpleasant; 
but I am confident that there are ration- 
alist parrots who can demonstrate that 
it would be a cruel kindness to let a 
parrot out to fall a prey to cats, or at 
least to forget its accomplishments and 
coarsen Its naturally delicate fibres In 
an unprotected struggle for existence. 
407 



Still, the only parrot a free-souled per- 
son can sympathize with is the one that 
insists on being let out as the first con- 
dition of its making itself agreeable. A 
selfish bird, you may say: one which 
puts its own gratification before that of 
the family which is so fond of it — be- 
fore even the greatest happiness of the 
greatest number: one that, in aping the 
independent spirit of a man, has unpar- 
roted itself and become a creature that 
has neither the home-loving nature of a 
bird nor the strength and enterprise of 
a mastiff. All the same, you respect 
that parrot in spite of your conclusive 
reasoning; and if it persists, you will 
have either to let it out or kill it. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 43, 44. 

The busybody finds that people cannot 
be freed from their failings from with- 
out. They must free themselves. 
When Nora is strong enough to live out 
of the doll's house, she will go out of 
it of her own accord if the door stands 
408 



open; but If before that period you 
take her by the scruff of the neck and 
thrust her out, she will only take refuge 
In the next establishment of the kind 
that offers to receive her. Woman has 
thus two enemies to deal with : the old- 
fashioned one who wants to keep the 
door locked, and the new-fashioned one 
who wants to thrust her Into the street 
before she Is ready to go. 

Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 104. 

It Is false to say that Woman Is now 
directly the slave of Man: she Is the 
Immediate slave of duty; and as man's 
path to freedom Is strewn with the 
wreckage of the duties and Ideals he 
has trampled on, so must hers be. She 
may Indeed mask her Iconoclasm by 
proving In rationalist fashion, as man 
has often done for the sake of a quiet 
life, that all these discarded Idealist con- 
ceptions will be fortified Instead of shat- 
tered by her emancipation. To a per- 
son with a turn for logic, such proofs 
409 



are as easy as playing the piano is to 
Paderewski. But it will not be true. 
A whole basketful of ideals of the most 
sacred quality will be smashed by the 
achievement of equality for women and 
men. Those who shrink from such a 
clatter and breakage may comfort them- 
selves with the reflection that the re- 
placement of the broken goods will be 
prompt and certain. It is always a case 
of "The Ideal is dead: long live the 
ideal!" And the advantage of the 
work of destruction is, that every new 
ideal is less of an illusion than the one 
it has supplanted; so that the destroyer 
of ideals, though denounced as an 
enemy of society, is in fact sweeping the 
world clear of lies. Qiimtessence of 
Ibsenism, p. 45. 

Now of all the idealist abominations 
that make society pestiferous, I doubt if 
there be any so mean as that of forcing 
self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence 
that she likes it; and, if she ventures to 
410 



contradict the pretence, declaring her 
no true woman. Quintessence of Ibsen- 
ism, p. 33. 

The fundamental reason for not allow- 
ing women to risk their lives in battle 
and for giving them the first chance of 
escape in all dangerous emergencies: in 
short, for treating their lives as more 
valuable than male lives, is not in the 
least a chivalrous reason, though men 
may consent to it under the illusion of 
chivalry. It is a simple matter of ne- 
cessity; for if a large proportion of 
women were killed or disabled, no pos- 
sible readjustment of our marriage law 
could avert the depopulation and con- 
sequent political ruin of the country. 
Getting Married, p. 149. 

A slave state is always ruled by those 
who can get round the masters : that is, 
by the more cunning of the slaves 
themselves. Thus fashionable London, 
like its outposts on the Coast and the 
Riviera, is bound, body and soul, under 
411 



an organized tyranny of servants and 
tradesmen which no spirited coolie 
would endure without rebellion. That 
is why Liberal Dukes and Radical Earls 
excite no surprise, whereas a Radical 
valet or a Liberal west-end jeweller has 
never yet been heard of. 
The slavery of women means the 
tyranny of women. No fascinating 
woman ever wants to emancipate her 
sex: her object is to gather power into 
the hands of Man, because she knows 
that she can govern him. She is no 
more jealous of his nominal supremacy 
than he himself is jealous of the strength 
and speed of his horse. 

Correspondence. 

The cunning and attractive " slave 
women " disguise their strength as 
womanly timidity, their unscrupulous- 
ness as womanly innocence, their impuni- 
ties as womanly defencelessness : simple 
men are duped by them, and little ones 
disarmed and intimidated. They can 
412 



be beaten only by brutal selfishness or 
by their own weapons, which many men 
learn to use with more than feminine 
skill. Correspondence. 

It is only the proud, straightforward 
women who wish, not to govern, but to 
be free, who object to slavery and give 
a hand to the unattractive, drudging 
women, who cannot get round anybody. 

Correspondence. 

Women have to unlearn the false good 
manners of their slavery before they 
acquire the genuine good manners of 
their freedom. You Never Can Tell, 
P- 334. 

A woman like Candida has divine in- 
sight: she loves our souls, and not our 
follies and vanities and illusions, or our 
collars and coats, or any other of the 
rags and tatters we are rolled up in. 

Candida, p. 143. 

Women begin to be socially tolerable 
at thirty, and improve until the deepen- 

413 



Ing of their consciousness is checked by 
the decay of their faculties. But they 
begin to be pretty much earher than 
thirty, and are indeed sometimes at 
their best in that respect long before 
their chattering is, apart from the Il- 
lusions of sex, to be preferred in serious 
moments to the silent sympathy of an 
Intelligent pet animal. The Saturday 
Review, 13th March 1897. 



wongB y\ MONG the friends to whom I have 
Initiative -^^^ read this play [Man and Super- 
man] in manuscript are some of my 
own sex who are shocked at the " un- J 
scrupulousness," meaning the total dis- \ 
regard of masculine fastidiousness, with 
which the woman pursues her purpose. 
It does not occur to them that if women 
were as fastidious as men, morally or 
physically, there would be an end of the 
race. Is there anything meaner than 
to throw necessary work upon other peo- 
ple and then disparage it as unworthy 
414 



and Indelicate? We laugh at the 
haughty American nation because it 
makes the negro clean Its boots and 
then proves the moral and physical In- 
feriority of the negro by the fact that 
he Is a shoeblack; but we ourselves 
throw the whole drudgery of creation 
on one sex, and then Imply that no fe- 
male of any womanliness or delicacy 
would Initiate any effort In that direc- 
tion. There are no limits to male 
hypocrisy In this matter. No doubt 
there are moments when man's sexual 
immunities are made acutely humiliating 
to him. When the terrible moment of 
birth arrives, Its supreme Importance 
and Its superhuman effort and peril, in 
which the father has no part, dwarf 
him Into the meanest Insignificance: he 
slinks out of the way of the humblest 
petticoat, happy If he be poor enough to 
be pushed out of the house to outface 
his Ignominy by drunken rejoicings. 
But when the crisis Is over he takes 
his revenge, swaggering as the bread- 

41S 



winner, and speaking of Woman's 
" sphere " with condescension, even 
with chivalry, as If the kitchen and the 
nursery were less Important than the 
office In the city. When his swagger Is 
exhausted he drivels Into erotic poetry 
or sentimental uxorlousness; and the 
Tennysonlan King Arthur posing at 
Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovel- 
ling before Dulclnea. You must ad- 
mit that here Nature beats Comedy out 
of the field: the wildest homlnlst or fem- 
inist farce Is Insipid after the most com- 
monplace " slice of life." The pretence 
that women do not take the Initiative 
Is part of the farce. Why, the whole 
world Is strewn with snares, traps, gins 
and pitfalls for the capture of men by 
women. Give women the vote, and In 
five years there will be a crushing tax 
on bachelors. Men, on the other hand, 
attach penalties to marriage, depriving 
women of property, of the franchise, 
of the free use of their limbs, of that 
ancient symbol of Immortality, the right 
416 



to make oneself at home in the house 
of God by taking off the hat, of every- 
thing that he can force Woman to dis- 
pense with without compelling himself 
to dispense with her. AH. In vain. 
Woman must marry because the race 
must perish without her travail: If the 
risk of death and the certainty of pain, 
danger and unutterable discomforts 
cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled 
ankles will not. And yet we assume 
that the force that carries women 
through all these perils and hardships, 
stops abashed before the primnesses of 
our behavior for young ladles. It Is 
assumed that the woman must wait, mo- 
tionless, until she is wooed. Nay, she 
often does wait motionless. That Is 
how the spider waits for the fly. But 
the spider spins her web. And if the 
fly, like my hero, shews a strength that 
promises to extricate him, how swiftly 
does she abandon her pretence of pas- 
siveness, and openly fling coil after coll 
about him until he is secured for ever I 



417 



If the really impressive books and 
other art-works of the world were pro- 
duced by ordinary men, they would ex- 
press more fear of women's pursuit than 
love of their illusory beauty. But or- 
dinary men cannot produce really im- 
pressive art-works. Those who can 
are men of genius: that is, men selected 
by Nature to carry on the work of build- 
ing up an intellectual consciousness of 
her own instinctive purpose. Accord- 
ingly, we observe in the man of genius 
all the unscrupulousness and all the 
" self-sacrifice " (the two things are the 
same) of Woman. He will risk the 
stake and the cross; starve, when neces- 
sary, in a garret all his life; study wom- 
en and live on their work and care as 
Darwin studied worms and lived upon 
sheep; work his nerves into rags with- 
out payment, a sublime altruist in his 
disregard of himself, an atrocious ego- 
tist in his disregard of others. Here 
Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, 
as irresistible as her own; and the clash 
418 



Is sometimes tragic. When it is com- 
plicated by the genius being a woman, 
then the game is one for a king of 
critics: your George Sand becomes a 
mother to gain experience for the novel- 
ist and to develop her, and gobbles up 
men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and 
the like, as mere hors d'ceuvres. 
Man and Superman, pp. xvii., xviii., xix. 

It is impossible to demonstrate that the 
initiative in sex transactions remains 
with Woman, and has been confirmed 
to her, so far, more and more by the 
suppression of rapine and discourage- 
ment of importunity, without being 
driven to very serious reflections on the 
fact that this initiative is politically the 
most important of all the initiatives, be- 
cause our political experiment of democ- 
racy, the last refuge of cheap misgov- 
ernment, will ruin us if our citizens are 
ill bred. Man and Superman, pp. xxi., 
xxil. 

■ I I - 

4*9 



work^ tj^OR my part I see no difficulty in find- 
unem-^ -** ing work for the unemployed. Take 
^°^® the places they live in, for instance. 
There is the urgently necessary work of 
knocking those places down, burning 
their putrid debris, and replacing them 
with decent dwellings in airy and hand- 
some streets. The spots to begin with 
are already marked by Mr. Charles 
Booth on the map of London in black. 
It is true that there is no commercial 
demand for a new and decent city; but 
pray for what great social work is there 
any commercial demand? How long 
more will it take us to see that great 
nations work for national profits, and 
keep the little souls who can understand 
nothing but commercial profits out of 
the national councils. The Times, 14th 
November 1905. 

I the"°^ "pANNY. It's all that the young can 
^ "*■ do for the old, to shock them and 

keep them up to date. 

Fanny's First Play (unpublished, 19 12). 
420 



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